


Light of the Life That Is

by Lomonaaeren



Series: Shadows and Light [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: AU, Angst, Deathly Hallows, Drama, Gen, Gentleness, M/M, Master of Death Harry, Return from Death, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-11-24
Updated: 2014-07-11
Packaged: 2018-01-02 13:11:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 29,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1057178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lomonaaeren/pseuds/Lomonaaeren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sequel to Shadows of a Future Passed. Harry Potter's shade marched through the Forbidden Forest for six years- until Draco stopped it and brought him back to life. The question both of them face is: What now?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Many Meetings

**Author's Note:**

> his is a fic for animegirl0087, who generously donated to help victims of the typhoon in the Philippines, and asked for a sequel to ‘Shadows of a Future Passed,’ a one-shot I posted two years ago. This story picks up immediately after that, and won’t make much sense without having read that fic. “Light of the Life That Is” should be six to eight chapters, posted irregularly.
> 
> Warnings for angst, brief violence, AU, age difference (Harry is 18 and Draco is 24).

Potter closed his eyes as he took another bite of the blackberry tart, his tongue capturing the hot berries as they fell out of the crust. Draco concealed a smile behind the glass of champagne that he had asked for from the house-elves, along with the food, the minute they arrived back in his rooms. He didn’t drink much champagne, but he liked it, and this was one of the times when he thought he should have what he liked.  
  
Things would be different soon enough.  
  
Potter opened his eyes and leaned back, his hands folded over his stomach. His face was softly astonished, his eyes as bright as bedewed spiderwebs. Draco nodded to him. That made sense, when Potter was tasting his first food in six years.  
  
 _Almost seven,_ Draco repeated to himself, and sipped again.  
  
“What happens now?” Potter asked, turning his gaze on Draco. “You said we would think about it when we were fed, and we’ve eaten.” He paused and raked those bright green eyes, which were sometimes as disconcerting as Draco remembered, up and down their plates. “Although I don’t think you ate much.”  
  
“I’ve already eaten by sunset, on most nights.” Draco cradled the glass of champagne in his hands and considered Potter. “And what we do next depends on two different things.”  
  
Potter waited a second, then snorted. “You can go ahead and explain them, Malfoy. I can count to two.”  
  
Draco bit down on his lip before an irritated exclamation could escape him. He took worse than this from cocky fifth-year Potions students every day. He really shouldn’t be letting his emotions run away with him.  
  
But it was Potter, and the rules had always been different for Potter. Even the rules of Draco’s own interior being, and that hadn’t changed now that Draco was older than Potter.  
  
He still spent a moment just watching the hero returned from the dead, and Potter allowed it, although his cheeks flushed and he turned to pick some more crumbs of blackberry tart off his plate.  
  
Potter shed a luster and a haze that couldn’t be accounted for by the fire behind him, or even by the fact that Draco had just used the Deathly Hallows to resurrect him. He simply  _shone_. Draco considered that idea, and nodded. He would have rejected it when he was younger, in irritation and pride at the fact that Potter always just  _had_ to be special.  
  
But now, he had seen other people shine like that. The Head Auror, when she accepted an Order of Merlin. Some of the Potions masters he had studied with, when they were carried away in their own awe at their creations. People who had been acknowledged for talents they had thought no one noticed, or been acknowledged by lovers or spouses who hadn’t paid much attention to them before. It was an  _ordinary_ shine, a light that so many could have if they strove for it.  
  
Potter was only special in having it most of the time, rather than on occasion.  
  
“First,” Draco said, “Ministry wizards, probably Aurors, showed up when I ordered the Elder Wand to conjure your body back into the tomb. I’ll have to deal with accusations of grave robbing, and probably necromancy.”  
  
Potter stared at him with his mouth open. Then it shut, and all that gentle luster, like the heart of a pulsing star, underwent an extraordinary transformation into a radiant fire. Draco stared, in the seconds before Potter’s eyes met his, and Draco found it easier to look back into his champagne again.  
  
“That’s  _ridiculous_ ,” Potter hissed, and his fingers clenched as though he was stroking his own invisible Nagini. “I’ll tell them that you brought me back to life, and they should stop questioning you.”  
  
Draco closed his eyes. It wasn’t champagne that fizzed and bubbled between his lips now; it was the high of knowing that Potter was angry  _for_ him.  
  
“Malfoy?”  
  
Right, Potter wouldn’t share Draco’s feelings. Draco shook his head and returned to earth. “That will help,” he said. “I just wanted you to know that it was one of the challenges we’ll face.” He wondered if it was his imagination that Potter seemed to turn his neck a little into that  _we_. “The other thing is that, of course, your friends and the staff and students here and the reporters and the Ministry are all going to want to meet you. You have to decide how you’ll handle that.”  
  
“Why not you, too?” Potter’s nostrils pinched shut with annoyance. “Are you going to abandon me now?”  
  
“I wanted to emphasize that the decision is yours.” Draco sat, a model of patience, until Potter actually  _looked_ at him, and then inclined his head. “You made a sacrifice for six years, almost seven, for the wizarding world.”  _Even if it was a silly sacrifice and one that no one knew about because they all thought you’d died._ “You can do whatever you want. Choose who you want to meet. Do things at certain times and not others. See certain people and not others.”  
  
Potter looked as young as a first-year then. Draco considerately looked away and into the fire, giving him some time to recover himself.   
  
Either Potter didn’t need as much time as Draco had assumed or he wanted things to move along, because almost seven years of being dead was enough. He leaned in until Draco had to look at him or watch Potter sprawl in the ashes of his fire. “I want to see Ron and Hermione.”  
  
“Of course.” Draco stood up, inclining his head. He had the suspicion that Weasley and Granger’s Floo would be open to his call, since they had sent him the Invisibility Cloak and had a good idea of what he was doing. “I suggest you stay here in my rooms for now, because no one else knows you’re back yet—”  
  
“You have a hearth right here.” Potter gestured to it, his eyes suspicious. “Aren’t I going to call from here?”  
  
“Well, yes,” Draco said, studying him until Potter flushed. “But I thought I would give you some time alone with your friends.”  
  
“You said the choice was mine to make.” Potter was apparently intent on reducing the arms of Draco’s chair to firewood, from the grip he had on them. “And I want you here.”  
  
Draco couldn’t help his smile, although he hoped that it still looked as grave and placid as he intended it to. “Then I will be.”  
  
*  
  
“Harry. Oh, my God.  _Harry_.”  
  
Hermione’s voice was hushed, and she clutched Harry as if he was going to disappear. Harry supposed he might. He still felt as though he was fragile and hollow, made of quills and light instead of flesh and bone. He’d extended his arms, and Hermione had been in them in seconds, her head ducked and her arms wrapped so completely around him that Harry’s first, startled thought was that she’d grown.  
  
And then she pulled back and smiled at him, and he saw that she  _was_ taller, her robes more formal than he’d ever seen them except at the Yule Ball, her hair long and curled neatly on top of her head. He swallowed. His throat was thick with something, and it wasn’t blackberry tart.  
  
He reached out to Ron, who had come tumbling through the Floo along with Hermione—he was taller, too, and it seemed as though Harry had forgotten how  _red_ his hair was when he was in that white place along with Voldemort—and saw Malfoy leaning against the wall next to the door. He gave Harry a single, level glance. Harry swallowed, and that made him able to hold onto Ron, who hugged him as though he knew exactly how fragile Harry’s ribs were feeling and he wanted to crack them all. He pounded Harry on the back as he released him, shaking his head in wonder.  
  
“ _Look_  at you,” he said, standing back and holding Harry’s shoulders as he looked them over. “You haven’t changed a day.” He darted a suspicious glance at Malfoy. Harry winced.  
  
Malfoy noticed the wince—Harry honestly wasn’t sure if Ron and Hermione did—and cleared his throat. “I used the Elder Wand to conjure his body as it would have looked on the day he died. That’s why.”  
  
“Then—” Hermione’s eyes softened. “I thought you looked  _small._  But you’re just the age you were, that’s all.”  
  
“Not in spirit,” Harry said, and hated the way his voice trembled, especially because it made both of his friends stare at him in vague alarm. He threw Malfoy another glance. Malfoy’s return look might have been an anvil that Harry could brace his arm on. Harry turned back to his friends. “I spent six years guarding that piece of Voldemort’s soul that was in the Horcrux.”  
  
This time, Hermione was the one who looked at Malfoy. Harry shook his head, and stopped himself forcibly after a second, because he knew he would just go on shaking it if he didn’t. “He knows all about the Horcruxes. I already told him.”  
  
“And all about the time he spent guarding that piece of the Dark Lord,” said Malfoy. Harry experienced a little flash of annoyance that Malfoy just wouldn’t say the name  _Voldemort._ He was the one who had been so insistent on telling Harry that the bastard was dead, and that no piece of his soul survived, not even the piece Harry had spent so long guarding. “Useless sacrifice though it was.”  
  
“It  _wasn’t._ ” Ron had his arms around Harry again, and Harry felt smothered. But it also helped him feel real and in the world again, so he didn’t object. “Nothing Harry did could ever be useless.”  
  
“He stayed there when he didn’t have to, and let his shade march through the Forest for six years in pain and torment, and convinced everyone he was dead,” said Malfoy, unmoved, unmoving. “Yes, it was useless.”  
  
Ron pinched his lips shut instead of exploding right away. That surprised Harry, and he blinked in uncertainty. The Ron he knew had been more hot-tempered as well as being taller.  
  
 _A lot has changed in the six years I’ve been gone,_ he thought, and felt the swell of intolerable sadness.  
  
Ron turned back to him, and seemed to see the change in Harry’s face, and caught him close again with a muffled exclamation. “We could never be sorry to see that you survived,” he whispered into Harry’s ear. “ _Never_. Put that out of your head.”  
  
Harry shook his head, his throat and his eyes both filling up. That wasn’t what he was afraid of. He could be gone ninety years, he thought, a hundred, and his friends would still care about him. The problem was that he hadn’t aged with them, and Malfoy hadn’t called back an older body for him—perhaps hadn’t been able to. There had to be limits even to the Elder Wand’s power.  
  
He had been gone six years. He felt as if the realization was only falling on him now, as if he was pinned beneath a wall and it was impossible to get a breath.  
  
Ron stepped back from him and gave him a worried smile, only to be replaced by Hermione, who clasped his hands. “Give him a little breathing room,” she told Ron, who rolled his eyes and backed off enough that Harry could indeed breathe. That made Harry smile, to hear her sound like the Hermione he remembered.  
  
Then Hermione turned towards her with her brow furrowed and said, “I’m sorry, Harry, but Ginny—”  
  
“She’s already married, I know, Malfoy told me,” Harry interrupted, hearing his words hurtle along like the bouncing of small pebbles, and knowing that was wrong, too, or at least against Hermione’s memories of him, from the way her lips parted and her eyes focused on him. Harry squirmed and lowered his gaze. “But I know,” he finished. “So I’ll be happy to see her, but I don’t—I didn’t expect her to be here to welcome me.”  
  
“She would have come if she was  _invited_ ,” Ron said, and gave a sharp look at Malfoy. Malfoy continued watching them all, still as mist at twilight, as calm.  
  
And comforting, Harry thought, which wasn’t something he would have thought before. He caught his breath, and swallowed, as another realization struck. He hadn’t come back as the Harry his friends remembered, perfectly unchanged, while they had aged. More than half a decade on guard duty had altered him, too. He didn’t  _feel_ adult in the same way Ron and Hermione were, with lines of experience on their faces. After all, he had done the same thing day in and day out.  
  
But—  
  
But it was  _something,_ wasn’t it, to have marched back and forth on guard duty for part of Voldemort, while another part of him had marched through the Forbidden Forest here the way that Malfoy said he had?  
  
Harry shook his head. “Don’t blame Malfoy for that,” he said. “I said that I wanted to see you right away. I didn’t ask for Ginny.”  
  
“Oh. Well. Because you knew about her, right?” Hermione’s thumbs rubbed back and forth on Harry’s wrists. “Because you knew she was married, and you knew it would be strange to see her when you were in love with her and she thought you were dead, so she moved on?”  
  
Harry had to smile a little. As if Ginny needed an  _excuse_ to get married when she thought Harry was dead! “No,” he said. “Because I already knew that, but because the only ones I really wanted were the two of you.”  
  
He thought that would please them, and it did get him another hug from Hermione. But she and Ron exchanged a look a minute later, and Hermione narrowed her eyes while Ron nodded. Harry felt a hollow ache in the center of him. They even had their own language, their own unspoken sentences. They had flowed on without him.  
  
Harry took a deep breath. Then he couldn’t simply depend on them and hope that things could be exactly the same again. Things could  _never_ be exactly the same again. He had to acknowledge the time that had passed and forge a new friendship, not long for the old one.  
  
He had never had that kind of determination, that kind of strength, during the years he had spent guarding the shard of Voldemort’s soul. He hadn’t allowed himself to think about his own strength, any more than he had about where the food and water he ate and drank came from. He had his duty, and he couldn’t look beyond it.  
  
Malfoy had forced him to do that. Harry took another look at the solid, quiet man in the corner again.  
  
Malfoy’s return gaze remained calm, steady.  
  
Harry nodded, and was relieved to see a little smile break out on Malfoy’s lips. Although he couldn’t possibly know what Harry was thinking, Malfoy at least seemed to consent to Harry’s begging for a silent language of their own.   
  
Thus fortified, Harry turned back to what he knew would be an uncomfortable conversation.  
  
*  
  
Draco folded his hands beneath his chin, feeling the same way he did when he sat over a pile of student essays. This was potentially good entertainment, potentially a disaster waiting to happen. With the student papers, it was often a mixture, but more on the disaster side than otherwise. Until Draco came along, the quality of Potions teaching at Hogwarts had been dipping steadily since Snape’s day.  
  
But this promised a breath of fresh air that Draco could feel his lungs aching to draw. The way that he had revived into what seemed a younger, or more vital, version of himself when he was arguing with Potter in his soulscape.  
  
Potter’s friends were still going to be his friends, that was certain. Draco didn’t think his friendship with Blaise or Pansy had ever been as deep as theirs, and still he knew the way he would run panting for a chance of conversing with them, if he had ever thought that either of them was dead.  
  
But Potter’s friends had also assumed that they were getting that eighteen-year-old—or seventeen-year-old? Honestly, Draco wasn’t sure how to calculate Potter’s age now—back. Unchanged. With his head still full of the same dreams he had had when he walked into the Forest.  
  
Draco had always wanted to see what would happen if Potter changed his dreams a little, and then told them to Granger and Weasley. He’d never thought he would  _get_ to, but that hadn’t stopped him wanting the thing. He had simply put the desire away, like his desire to change the past, when he grew up and became more accepting of his life and the war.  
  
Now, he got to see that very thing happen, and he couldn’t have been more pleased if someone had handed him a sapphire of the first water for one of his Potions. He grinned to himself, and waited, and watched.   
  
“Ginny would want to see you.” Granger led the charge, staring meltingly at Potter. Did she think her affection for him hadn’t changed, either?  _Possibly,_ Draco decided. It hadn’t lessened in strength, but there was a hovering in the way she stood that showed she was conscious of the years and the height she had gained. “You know that.”  
  
“I’m not in love with her anymore,” Potter said. “I thought about her during the years I spent on guard, along with all the rest of you, but not as much as I thought about you and Ron.” He glanced at Weasley, his eyes big with his appeal, but not desperate. Draco could have nodded his approval; he chose not to. “And I realize now that I don’t want anyone to think that I’m still in love with her. I don’t want to marry her.”  
  
Weasley blinked and blinked again. “But we were going to be brothers,” he said. “Brothers-in-law. Aurors. Best mates.”  
  
“I don’t want to be an Auror, either,” Potter said.  
  
Draco could have shaken a glass of champagne out of his hand with laughter at the befuddled looks Potter got in return. Surely his career and his marriage weren’t the most important topics that anyone could discuss with the newly-returned, recently-presumed-dead, hero of the wizarding world?  
  
 _Perhaps not,_ Draco realized a moment later. But that wasn’t exactly what was going on here. Potter’s friends were trying to reach for some sense of him, to figure out who he was now that he had come back and spent so long away from them. And that meant they had to think of him as an honorary Weasley and their friend and someone who loved Weasley’s sister and an Auror trainee, because those were the strongest and simplest of the old identifications.  
  
Only one of those was true now, Draco considered: the one that always would be, that he was their friend. But they were finding it difficult to deal with.  
  
“Why not?” Weasley was the one who asked, and the pause had been so long that Draco had to think back to the question. Yes, that was right. Potter had said that he didn’t want to be an Auror. “That was all you wanted to do before…” He pinched his lips shut again and shook his head, a gesture that Draco was already coming to think characteristic of this grown-up version of Weasley.  
  
“That was before I made that sacrifice,” Potter said, and his cheeks flushed and his voice lowered, speaking with growing passion. Draco felt his eyebrows rise. This was a Potter he had never seen before, and if Potter’s friends were alarmed and flinched before it, Draco himself could appreciate it. “Before I spent all my time on guard, protecting and fighting against evil. I hate the thought of it now.”  
  
“What are you going to do?” It was Granger who asked that simple question, still gazing into Potter’s face. She was the voice of reason and always would be, Draco thought, no matter how un-volatile Weasley had become with the passing years.  
  
“For now?” Potter gave Granger’s hands a quick squeeze and then stepped back. “Get the world accustomed to my presence. Tell the Ministry that Malfoy didn’t do anything evil when they saw him robbing my tomb.”  
  
“You did  _what_?” Granger turned around and stared at Draco as if she had never seen him before.  
  
At least she was giving him a chance to explain. Draco inclined his head, aware that an hour ago, if asked to explain this, he would have given some soft explanation with an eye to avoiding prosecution for necromancy. But Potter had woken up the bolder side of him, and Draco was prepared to ride it until the end. “I went to Potter’s tomb and used the Elder Wand to return his body to the state it was in when he died. The body that he’s wearing now,” he added helpfully, because Granger just stared.  
  
“That’s necromancy,” Weasley said softly, but he sounded disbelieving. “I learned enough in Auror training to know…you can’t bring the dead back to life.”  
  
“With the Deathly Hallows, you could bring the Master of Death back to life,” Draco said simply. “I wouldn’t want to try it with anyone else.”  
  
Granger and Weasley both hesitated, wavering, on the brink of a revelation that Draco suspected was simply too large for them. Then they turned back to Potter.  
  
“Will you come with us?” Weasley was the one to ask this time. “We have a comfortable house. Well-warded, since people sometimes still try to get to us. We could talk about what to do next when we get there.”  
  
Draco turned to Potter. He knew what  _he_ wanted to say, but it would be unfair to put that kind of pressure on Potter. He simply waited, his eyes on Potter’s face, and Potter took a deep breath and shook his head.  
  
“No,” he said. “I know that—I want to see you and talk to you, too, both of you, but I want to stay here.”  
  
“In Hogwarts?” Weasley frowned and shook his head. “I don’t think that would keep you safe from students staring at you.”  
  
“It would keep me safe from reporters,” said Potter, and wrapped his arms around his chest. Draco spelled the fire to leap up, and a second later Potter dropped his arms away from his chest and turned to face Draco. “No, I meant I want to stay here, in Malfoy’s rooms.”  
  
Draco’s breath caught, and then he dipped his head, not able to keep himself from smiling, and not wanting to try. The last six years had been a process of learning, as much as anything else, not to cast gifts away.  
  
Potter smiled back at him, but Granger said, looking back and forth between them, “Why? We’re very grateful to you, Malfoy, of course we are, but—I just don’t understand.”  
  
Potter was the one who caught  _her_ hands, this time, and smiled sweetly enough that Draco could see the purity of their friendship between them, sparkling and breaking like a golden rainbow. “I know. And I want to make you understand, Hermione. I want to talk to you about everything that happened and learn to know you again and have you know me.” He paused, his eyes glittering in the light of the fire.  
  
Granger let her lips part as she stared into Potter’s face. Her hand rose and her fingers curled back as if she would stroke along his cheek. It halted there, but she nodded and whispered, “We don’t really know you anymore, do we?”  
  
Potter held out one hand to her and one to Weasley, who came anxiously up to him, staring into his face as if he could devour the differences that had sprung up between them, Draco thought. “Not now. You  _will_.” And Draco knew that promises would happen when Harry Potter made them in that voice. “But for now, I just want to stay here and rest and  _think_. See the rest of your family, and you, but one by one, not in a huge group.”  
  
“You could do that at our house,” Weasley said. Draco thought he had grasped the implications of Potter’s words as well as Granger had, but he wasn’t letting himself comprehend them. “We’d let in Weasleys one at a time. You know we would.”  
  
Potter grinned at him, and memories moved behind his eyes in a cavalcade that Draco couldn’t join. “And you think you could keep them  _out_ once they hear that I’m back?”  
  
Weasley had the grace to blush. “Well. Maybe not, now that you mention it.”  
  
“I know,” Potter said, and his voice had gone soft again, like the crackling of the fire, like the leaves that Draco had brought him out of. “And I want to see them. But—not just now. I want to control the pace.” He was looking back and forth between his friends as though he could mimic their heartbeats with the speed of his eyes. “Do you understand?”  
  
If they had said they didn’t, Draco thought, Potter would have given in and gone with them. But either Weasley and Granger did, or they were wise enough to know that it would be good for Potter to stay here right now.  
  
Weasley nodded slowly. “You’ll see Ginny eventually, right?”  
  
Draco kept his face smooth, but he wanted to laugh the way he had when Blaise had said some of his soppy things about Pansy. Potter had already made his feelings about Weasley’s sister’s marriage clear. What did Weasley think would happen? That Potter would stride into one of his sister’s Quidditch practices and demand a duel with her husband?  
  
Draco paused. It was softly easy to think of the old Potter, the one before the war and from Hogwarts, as doing that, actually.  
  
But this Potter was different, and Draco had no fears of duels, even if Weasley did. He watched as Potter nodded and smiled, and held out his hand. Weasley squeezed it, then caught him close in yet another hug.  
  
Granger lingered longer, after Weasley seemed content to go back through the fire, asking Potter about the process by which he had come back to life. But Potter could actually tell her less than Draco could, only that the Deathly Hallows had restored him. Draco had been barred by the sight of the Invisibility Cloak from seeing what happened; Potter had been  _dead_ at the time.  
  
Granger finally sighed and stepped backwards, nodding. She looked at Draco for a moment. “Can I speak with you privately, Malfoy?” she asked suddenly.  
  
“Not if, by that, you mean private from Potter,” Draco said, cocking his head slowly enough that Potter had time to turn around and watch. “I won’t have any secrets from him over this.”  
  
“I just meant—” Granger flushed. “I wondered—I don’t understand  _how_ you commanded the Elder Wand to do what you did. I just wanted to ask you some more questions about that, and I thought it would be distressing for Harry to listen to.”  
  
Difference in the years or not, the look she cast Potter then reassured Draco. She held him in fondness; maybe she would have to learn how to change that fondness, but she was a true friend. That Draco hadn’t had the same kind of friendship in his life didn’t mean he refused to recognize it. A pulse of warmth went through him now, for Potter’s sake.  
  
“I see,” Draco said, with a faint smile. “But I already told you. The Elder Wand brought its Master back. And how it did that, only the Wand could tell you.”  
  
“And now it can’t tell you anything,” Potter added, “because I snapped it.”  
  
Weasley and Granger both turned to stare at him. Draco cocked his head again, this time thoughtfully. He didn’t know that he really understood much better than Weasley and Granger how Potter could give up that much power, because he hadn’t seen it happen, either. But he was closer than them to understanding that it had happened, and it had to be accepted.  
  
“I thought nothing could destroy the Elder Wand,” Granger whispered. “It’s survived all those centuries.”  
  
“I wrapped it in the Invisibility Cloak and snapped it.” Potter grimaced. “It wasn’t easy, but it had used a lot of power, and I think that probably helped.” He glanced sideways at Malfoy. “Malfoy could tell you.”  
  
Draco nodded when Weasley and Granger shuffled around to face him again, hiding his amusement at seeing them act like chess pieces trying to face attack from two directions. “I used the wand to bring Potter’s body back, and then to take me into the soulscape where I’d already spoken with him once before,” he said. “And then I think to bring us back from that place. It felt hollow and light in my hand when I was finished with those tasks. It had enough power to bind Potter’s soul to his body again, but not enough to resist when the Master of Death decided to break it. Would be my guess,” he added, because Granger’s mouth was falling open, and he knew that she would ask how he knew it.  
  
“Why do you still call him Potter if you went through all that with him?” Weasley demanded.  
  
Draco blinked, slowly. That seemed an odd question to ask him, both for Weasley and for the changed Weasley. But he answered. “Because that’s the way I feel about him, and the way he probably feels about me. He hasn’t given me permission to call him by his first name yet.”  
  
That got him more stares, although the one from Potter said he understood, in the same way that Draco understood how he could give up the Elder Wand. Draco did have to wonder why his honesty got more interrogation than his lies had done, six years ago.  
  
“You’d better not be lying,” Weasley muttered. All the confusion, all the anger about Potter’s situation that he couldn’t express to Potter for fear of sounding as though he was upset about having him back, was to be turned in Draco’s direction, Draco saw.  
  
Draco sighed and shook his head. “What gain could I make from lying? Absolutely none. I promise you, I changed in the last six years, too. I learned how to live my life, and I came back here to reconcile myself to the aftermath of the war. I rescued Potter because I wanted to, because I didn’t think his shade should march through the Forbidden Forest forever. All of that is the truth.”  
  
“He doesn’t have a reason to lie,” Potter said quietly, drawing his friends’ eyes back to him. “And I do want to stay here.”  
  
“In his rooms.” Weasley’s voice was flat, but a little hopeful, waiting for Potter to contradict him. He just stared again when Potter nodded.  
  
“Yes,” Potter said. “I think it would be for the best.” He turned and gazed thoughtfully at Draco, as if waiting for him to say something wise that would add to this. But Draco had nothing wise to add. He spread his hands and bowed, a little.  
  
“You are welcome.” He said it like that, formally, so there could be no mistake. Weasley and Granger were still staring as though they expected him to sprout a second head or wings and turn into his real, demonic form at any time, but Potter had given him a faint smile, an expression that Draco couldn’t remember seeing on his face either in the past or when they had spoken in the soulscape. That was enough.  
  
“How are you going to tell people that you’re back?” Granger asked. Draco couldn’t tell whether she had moved on to a different question and accepted defeat on this one, or whether she intended to come back to it. Well, Potter was the one who had to make the decision, and if he chose to leave later, Draco would respect that. If he chose to stay, Draco would lend any support to the decision that Potter needed.  
  
The realization of what had happened in the Forest, why Potter’s shade had marched there and what his soul had gone through in guarding the remaining bit of the Dark Lord, still rose in Draco like a tide, covering more ground all the time. Potter owed no one  _anything_ after that. He has the most perfect right of anybody Draco had known to demand anything he wanted.  
  
He thought Potter’s friends would probably feel the same way, once they settled down to the notion. But they were thinking and reacting at the moment as though he desired the same things he had before the war. It was hard to blame them, Draco thought tolerantly. They thought they were dealing with the Harry Potter who had died then.  
  
Perhaps Potter hadn’t acquired much life experience, or not in the same ways, but he had changed. Eventually, his friends would look past that identical face and to the different soul.  
  
“I’ll start sending owls out tomorrow.” Potter yawned and glanced sleepily at Draco. “Including one to the Ministry so that they know they shouldn’t arrest you for tomb-robbing.”  
  
“Thank you,” Draco said gravely, and watched Potter’s lips twitch as he did.  
  
Weasley sighed forlornly. “But we can come back tomorrow?” Draco was glad to see that he directed the question towards Potter. Potter was the one who had to make the decision about who to speak to, as he had to make the decision about where he stayed.  
  
“Yes,” Potter said. “But now…I just ate my first food in years, and I think I want to have the first night’s sleep, now.”  
  
It didn’t take long, after that, for Potter to herd his friends out the fire. They hugged him again, and Granger cried a little, and made many promises to come back tomorrow and hold the secret to themselves for now. Potter flopped back into the chair where he had sat to eat dinner, and shut his eyes.  
  
“You’re all right?” Draco asked quietly, reaching out to pick up the bottle of elf-made wine that he’d had standing ready all evening. He thought he deserved it.  
  
“That’s a strange question,” said Potter, and kept his eyes shut.  
  
Draco just watched him, the way he sprawled and his dangling hands and the faint press of his knuckles against his skin. He waited, and waited, thinking that he would feel some kind of revelation breaking over him like a tidal wave, or he would feel a retraction, a recoil from this body that looked so much the way Potter had during the war.  
  
But no retraction and no recoil happened. This was Potter, no one else—the stubborn soul Draco had argued with in the soulscape, the Gryffindor who had dedicated his life to a noble and stupid cause for years, the Master of Death who had come back from death and half-death and wandering shade-life.  
  
Draco stood up and crossed the distance between them. Potter was breathing evenly, softly, and Draco thought about waking him up and pointing him to bed so that he wouldn’t be stiff in the morning. But this was his first sleep, and Draco didn’t want to beak it or reject his unspoken choice of the chair.  
  
Draco did lean over, because he wanted to and he didn’t think Potter would mind, to touch his forehead, to reassure himself with the reality of flesh beneath his fingers.  
  
Potter opened his eyes and pinned him with that green gaze Draco had—he might as well say it—had missed so long and so intensely. Then he said, “Were you touching my scar?”  
  
Draco blinked and stared down. Yes, the lightning bolt scar was under his fingers. Honestly, he hadn’t noticed before. He shook his head and answered, “I wanted to make sure that you were solid.”  
  
Potter gave a smile so long and slow that it reminded Draco of a flower falling to the Forest floor. It grabbed something in Draco’s chest and twisted, the way that no fall of a flower had done since the war, standing in the back of the Manor and watching through the windows there as the untended roses in the gardens tumbled to ruins.  
  
“Thank you,” Potter whispered. “I like it when you do that.”  
  
Draco nodded, and with the tightness and brilliancy of what had happened between them in his chest like spring, it seemed a long moment before he could take his hand from Potter’s forehead and himself to bed.  
  
As he lay silently in his room, he wondered for a moment what the falling flower would mean, what the spring-like feeling would indicate.  
  
Then he smiled and closed his eyes. Whatever it meant, it was his choice and Potter’s. And he did not think it would be less honest than the autumn they had walked through on the way back up to the castle.


	2. Meetings at the Ministry

“Ready?”  
  
“No.”  
  
Draco turned from the mirror, but Potter had already grimaced and shaken his head. He was wearing a pair of Draco’s robes that Draco had shrunken down and turned green. Potter had given him a long look when he did that, but after his own primping before the mirror, seemed to accept it as the color that suited him best.  
  
Draco breathed a little sight of relief now. “You’re not ready because no one is ever ready for going back to the Ministry and explaining how he came back to life?”  
  
Potter’s eyes met his quizzically for a moment. “It’s almost scary how good you are at anticipating what I’m going to say,” he muttered. “What I’m thinking.”  
  
Draco smiled. He knew it was broader than the smile he would have given a year ago, a month ago, and he had Potter to thank for that. “When I was earning my Potions mastery, I had to study under people more inscrutable than Professor Snape. I gained a lot of experience in anticipating emotions and empathy, experience that I wouldn’t have gained without that.”  
  
Potter shivered and tucked his hands into his sleeves. Draco was about to spell the fire warmer when Potter said, “Bloody hell,” in what Draco thought was his best Weasley imitation. “There are people more inscrutable than  _Snape_?”  
  
Draco laughed. Then he paused to consider the strangeness of the sound, the cool silvery sound of it. His mother had once told him, when he was a child, that he laughed like bells, but Draco had never believed her. Now, he could almost hear it.  
  
Potter looked at him in wonder. Draco smiled again, more naturally, he hoped, without second-guessing, and put his hand on Potter’s shoulder. “There are. And some of them are on the Wizengamot. We’ll speak the complete truth and hope that it’ll be enough. But dressing in nice robes won’t hurt.”  
  
“The truth is never enough with the Wizengamot,” Potter muttered.  
  
“Then we’ll take Veritaserum,” Draco said, unruffled. He saw no reason to remove his hand from Potter’s shoulder yet, since Potter still seemed to need the reassurance. “They can’t disbelieve it then. It’s not like I’m the one who’s going to brew it.”  
  
Potter paused, then reached up and covered Draco’s hand with his. “You’re even better at the comforting thing,” he whispered.  
  
Draco had the strange feeling—stranger than listening to his own laugh for the sound of bells—that he could have stood there forever, feeling his rooms spin around him and staring into Potter’s eyes.  
  
But he  _had_ to break the mood somehow, and that meant turning rather briskly around to cast the Floo powder into the fire. He did cough and say, “If you feel that it’s becoming too much or you need me to take over during your testimony, catch my eye and nod.”  
  
“All right,” Potter said. “But how are you going to tell the difference between that and just agreeing with what you say?”  
  
Draco had to turn his head back, whether or not he thought that was a good idea at the moment. “I’ll know. I’ll always know, with you.”  
  
Potter looked at him for one or two slow blinks, and then nodded. Draco smiled back and cast the Floo powder in at last, calling out, “Auror Department!”  
  
*  
  
“Is that—you can’t be!”  
  
“I heard what Gerald said, but I didn’t believe it was true!”  
  
“They  _let_ him come back after all this time?”  
  
Harry heard that last question, and although he contented himself with keeping his eyes on the floor and moving swiftly along at Malfoy’s side as they worked through that gauntlet of gawkers, down to the courtroom where the Wizengamot would see them, he frowned. So some people had thought he wasn’t dead at all, but in exile or kept far away from ordinary society by the Ministry? That wasn’t the kind of problem Harry had thought he would have to handle.  
  
But it was exactly the kind of idiocy that people who took the  _Prophet_ seriously would believe.  
  
Malfoy’s hand touched his shoulder again, and Harry glanced at him without seeming to glance at him or move his head up. Malfoy’s lips formed a few quick words.  _You have nothing to feel guilty about._  
  
 _No shit,_ Harry thought irritably, but he knew what Malfoy meant. He had wanted to look humble by keeping his eyes lowered, but as the people around him had just forcefully proven, there was always someone who could attribute a guilty, hangdog look to anything. It was better to meet people’s eyes fearlessly.  
  
And what did  _he_ have to fear? Malfoy was right. He had spent six years in limbo to save all these people. There was no reason that he had to hesitate. There was no reason that he owed  _them_ anything, instead of the other way around.  
  
So Harry lifted his head, and saw a few Aurors scatter out of his direct line of sight as though he had the power to slay with his eyes like a basilisk. Harry half-wished he did. Or at least the power to shut up the whispers that flowed along with his steps.  
  
He had thought this would be easier. Instead, it was so much harder than meeting his friends, even with six years of history that he hadn’t been there before.  
  
But Malfoy’s hand brushed his side, along the line of his robes where his wand would be if Harry had his back right now, and Harry straightened up. The wand problem was one that he would have to get taken care of as soon as possible, he thought. Apparently the shattered halves of his holly wand had been buried in his tomb, but there was generally no way of repairing a wand, which was why they snapped most of them when someone went into Azkaban.  
  
 _I’ll visit Ollivander’s, then. I need a wand._  
  
“Mr. Potter, a word?”  
  
Harry turned his head a little, and saw a woman tracking him, her brown hair pulled back into a severe bun on her head and her eyes wide. That made her look official, but he noticed the quill and the sheaf of parchment she carried, some of it already covered by notes, and he sneered and turned to face forwards again.  
  
“Mr. Potter, you  _have_ to tell us what brought you back to life!” The reporter was jabbing her quill into the parchment now as though she thought it would flutter away from her if it didn’t.  
  
“Draco Malfoy,” said Harry, and kept marching.  
  
Of course, she wasn’t satisfied with that and kept fluttering, but Malfoy turned around and gave her one calm glance. It wasn’t even with any menace, Harry thought. Malfoy seemed to have trained that out of himself along with the coldness and childish anger he’d once been prey to. But his immense dignity made her shut her mouth, and finally nod, and creep away. Harry sighed with profound relief.  
  
“If someone else bothers you, then you tell me,” Malfoy said. He didn’t lower his voice, and he didn’t raise it. Nevertheless, the whole corridor seemed to fall silent to listen to what he said.  
  
Harry tugged at the front of his robes a little. It would probably be easy to intimidate people if he was  _taller._ Stupid short body. It was time to accept that he would never grow taller, but it was still so bloody irritating. “Thank you,” he said, and kept walking. He would have to learn the air of dignity without the height.  
  
He had picked a good teacher, though. Although the current of gossip continued flowing around them like so much rubbish in a river, no one else came never enough to them to be vanquished like the first reporter had.  
  
They reached the Wizengamot courtroom at last, a different one than the one Harry had stood trial in during the summer before his fifth year. There was no huge gallery set back from the floor here, but a raised platform with three broad steps up to it, covered in thick red carpeting. It was also covered with seats, most of them armchairs, and the Wizengamot members were sitting on them. In front of the platform were a bunch of chairs for the witnesses.   
  
Malfoy walked to the large one that was in the center of the front row and sat down. It seemed to catch the Aurors by surprise, since they milled for a few seconds. While they were still trying to decide how to order around someone who obeyed the rules, Harry took the chair beside him.  
  
It was satisfying, the way both the Wizengamot members and the Aurors gawped in response. But Harry’s best reward was the flash of quick respect and approval in Malfoy’s eyes.  
  
 _That’s what makes him so different from anyone else, except Ron and Hermione,_ Harry decided.  _He respects me. The rest of them are just bewildered._  
  
Harry nodded to the woman he assumed led the Wizengamot, the one sitting in the central chair in the front row, so nearly directly opposite Malfoy’s as to make it seem as though they were sitting in judgment on the same court. “Madam—what is your name?”  
  
For a moment, she measured him with her eyes, about the color of Malfoy’s, but a little bluer, and colder. Then she smiled. Harry heard a whisper traveling among the Aurors, and hoped that meant he had managed to impress her. “Belinda Fairmore,” she said.  
  
“Good,” Harry said. “So, to avoid a long and lengthy trial, I think that we should have the Veritaserum right away.”  
  
Madam Fairmore sat up a little. “You are aware that if Professor Malfoy confesses to grave-robbing and necromancy, then he could be in serious trouble?”  
  
Harry smiled a little, with a confidence he didn’t  _really_ feel but knew he could fake. “That’s okay. When you give it to me, you’re going to hear how I couldn’t have come back without him. But it wasn’t necromancy, was it?” He had read some of the books in Malfoy’s office and thought about this long and hard, something he hadn’t discussed with Malfoy in detail because he didn’t want Malfoy to think that he needed to sacrifice himself. “Necromancy is when you call up someone dead. But I was only ¬ _half-_ dead. I was trapped in a limbo between life and death.”  
  
“Necromancy is the art of calling up the dead, no matter what they are,” snapped a younger man to Madam Fairmore’s left.  
  
“But I’m not dead,” Harry said, and stretched out one arm in front of him so that everyone could see the color of his skin. “At least, if I was an Inferius, I think someone would have noticed by now.”  
  
There was a chuckle, and Madam Fairmore put a hand to her lips as though to conceal her part in it. The young man flushed and retreated a little.  
  
“This is an extraordinary case,” Harry said, pitching his voice low and catching Madam Fairmore’s eye. Malfoy had said something about how everyone would be impressed by Harry right now in a way that they never would again, and that he should use that to his advantage. He had also said something about how Harry could look at someone and make them feel like they were alone in a room with him, and Harry hoped that applied to Madam Fairmore as well as Malfoy. “No one else has come back from necromancy alive. No one else was the Master of the Deathly Hallows. I was.”  
  
“You were?” Madam Fairmore wasn’t smiling now. “You are not at the moment?”  
  
“Give me the Veritaserum, and I’ll tell you how it is,” Harry said, inclining his head. “And was.”  
  
*  
  
Draco wanted to explode in pride, but someone might stare at him if he leaped to his feet and did a war whoop and a dance around his chair.  
  
So he managed to sit there and blandly smile, but he did wish that he could at least reach over and hug Potter.  
  
Potter was doing wonderfully. He was using his fame to protect himself—and Draco, but it was amazing how little Draco cared about that in comparison to Potter getting away with it—and insisting on telling the whole story once, not a thousand times. And he was revealing secrets that it didn’t matter if he told now, because the time when they could have hurt him was past.  
  
Potter had told him the tale about almost being Sorted into Slytherin. Draco wouldn’t have believed it if someone had told him instead of him seeing it in action for himself, but it did seem that six years of the most Gryffindor-like guard duty imaginable had managed to sharpen Potter’s Slytherin traits.  
  
 _Well,_ Draco had to admit, as he leaned back in his chair and gracefully crossed his legs, getting comfortable while everyone else watched Potter taking the Veritaserum,  _perhaps he had nothing else to think about. They do say that boredom concentrates the mind wonderfully, sometimes._  
  
Draco wouldn’t know. He hadn’t been bored in years. Intense, quiet work on the one hand, and desperate survival on the other, hadn’t given him the chance.  
  
Potter’s face smoothed out as the Veritaserum took effect, and Madam Fairmore nodded and asked, “What is your full name?”  
  
“Harry James Potter.”  
  
Madam Fairmore had to raise her voice over the sigh that traveled around the room, which was packed with far more people from the Ministry than would be there normally, even though they could get permission to attend at any time. Draco knew why. And he knew that the sigh came because there had still been people, until then, who weren’t  _completely_ sure. “What is your date of birth?”  
  
“July thirty-first, 1980.”  
  
Madam Fairmore used a few more questions to demonstrate the Veritaserum was working, then leaned forwards. “You said that you were the master of the Deathly Hallows. Explain why you aren’t now.”  
  
Even though the Veritsaerum mostly kept the muscles in his face from tightening the necessary amount, Draco thought he could see a smile flitting along the corners of Potter’s mouth anyway. “I became the master of the Elder Wand because it used to belong to Dumbledore. Draco Malfoy disarmed Dumbledore when he was killed on the Astronomy Tower, and then I stole Malfoy’s wand. That meant the Elder Wand saw him as conquered and transferred its allegiance to me.”  
  
Draco heard more muttering and whispering, but he wasn’t tempted to look elsewhere. He kept his gaze on Potter, on the way he spoke and the slender, upright body that seemed to scream defiance at everyone and everything, at the entire Ministry if that was what was needed.  
  
He never  _wanted_ to look anywhere else, not even to check the rest of the faces of the Wizengamot and see if they were really believing this. He wondered if that was going to be a problem.  
  
“I didn’t understand that until later,” Potter continued quietly, his eyes on the distance, although from the angle his head was turned, he would probably still seem to be looking at Madam Fairmore. “But the Resurrection Stone had been passed down through Voldemort’s family, and it belonged to Albus Dumbledore, who destroyed the artifact it was in, at the time of his death. He passed it down to me. And the Invisibility Cloak that was my father’s is  _the_ one that Death created.”  
  
Madam Fairmore frowned a little. “Where is the Elder Wand now?”  
  
“I snapped it,” said Potter.  
  
There was a sharp buzz of commentary, but Madam Fairmore had already asked about the Resurrection Stone, and Potter answered by saying he got rid of it. Draco had to shake his head a little and readjust his own angle so he could go on listening.  
  
“I still have the Cloak,” Potter finished. “But I don’t think I can be the Master of Death anymore without the Elder Wand.”  
  
“Most likely not,” said Madam Fairmore, her eyes grim. “Why do you believe Draco Malfoy is not guilty of tomb-robbing and necromancy?”  
  
“Because those are Dark Arts and performed for Dark motives,” Potter said promptly. “But Malfoy only went to the tomb to get my body back and have the Elder Wand enchant it to look like it did on the day I died, and he didn’t use necromancy to pull a dead person back to life. My shade was walking through the Forbidden Forest every day at sunset for  _years_.” For the first time, his voice shook a little. “All the professors and the Headmistress at Hogwarts thought there was nothing they could do.”  
  
Draco half-closed his eyes, to keep anyone from seeing his reaction. The meeting between Potter and the Headmistress had been yesterday, and it had been painful to see how she reached out to him and then clasped her hands back against her mouth, shaking her head.   
  
“Malfoy was the only one who would take the risk.” Draco looked up at the change in Potter’s voice, and found his radiant face turned towards him. “If you go and look, there’s no shade in the Forbidden Forest anymore. And everyone knows that necromancy can’t make the dead come back to life. I’m alive.”  
  
“I would like some Healers from St. Mungo’s to investigate you and make sure,” Madam Fairmore murmured. “In the meantime, I would also like to dispatch Aurors to the Forbidden Forest and make sure that no shade marches there.” She looked around inquiringly at the rest of the Wizengamot.  
  
“It doesn’t happen until sunset,” someone volunteered.  
  
Madam Fairmore raised an eyebrow. “Then there’s plenty of time to get Aurors there and see if—Mr. Potter—is speaking the truth.”  
  
Some of the Aurors promptly peeled away from the group and made for the doors. Meanwhile, Madam Fairmore asked Potter a few more questions, but none of them ones that produced the reactions that had come so far, either in Draco or the rest of the chamber.  
  
Madam Fairmore finally leaned back. “Does anyone have any more questions?” None of the Wizengamot said anything. Draco could see why. Madam Fairmore was frighteningly good at this, and they might as well leave it up to her. “Very well. Then give Mr. Potter the antidote.”  
  
No one objected to that, either, and Draco watched as an Auror came forwards with it. He was glad to see that the antidote had been carefully measured out, and dropped onto Potter’s tongue with what looked like a proper reverence. At least  _some_ people in the Ministry were capable of feeling as they ought about what he had done.  
  
“Now we must present the Veritaserum to you,” Madam Fairmore told Draco.  
  
Draco bent his head, and swallowed the potion without protest. He had heard a few people whispering about how Potions masters knew how to defeat the potion, but that wasn’t true, and others had hushed them. Madam Fairmore asked him the preliminary questions, more quickly this time. He thought she probably knew how the mood of the room was changing, flitting about in quest of some place to settle, and was wise enough to press forwards before it found a place.  
  
“Did you rob the grave of Harry Potter?”  
  
“His tomb, yes,” said Draco. He met Madam Fairmore’s eyes, and smiled a little. He had been under Veritaserum many times over the years; he had been tested with it at every stage in the process of becoming a Potions master, since they wanted only qualified and passionate applicants, and he had been dosed with it over and over again during his trial. That didn’t mean he knew how to resist it, but he knew how to somewhat correct his answers.  
  
“What was your purpose in taking his body?”  
  
“To use the Elder Wand to revive him.” Draco was content to keep his answers short, and leave Potter with the elaborate explanations. He was the hero. He could get away with them. Draco was the one who had brought him back to life, but lesser, the instrument, the way Granger and Weasley themselves would have been if Potter had survived.  
  
He could see Potter watching him from the corner of his eye, but refused to worry about that. If Potter heard something that shocked him now, that only meant Draco hadn’t been clear enough before.  
  
“How did you know that would be possible?” Madam Fairmore’s face was stern.  
  
 _Shit. Well, I knew this would happen._ “I had been reading books on necromancy since I’d seen his shade marching in the Forest. I thought there was a way I could either bring him back to life, or at least ensure that his shade received rest.”  
  
“He’s practicing necromancy!” someone called from the back of the room. “He admitted it!”  
  
Draco couldn’t say what he wanted to say; he didn’t have that much control over his responses that he could speak easily under Veritaserum about things he hadn’t been asked. But he had a partner who stood up now and looked at the speaker coolly and asked, “But is it illegal just to have necromancy books?”  
  
“Of course!” said the Wizengamot member, but he looked uncertain now.  
  
Draco would have liked to hug Potter, if it wouldn’t have looked too strange. There were indeed loopholes built into the laws that covered where books had been acquired, if they were heirlooms, if the Ministry had ordered them burned on sight, and whether they showed signs of ever having been read or practiced from. The Ministry could probably still arrest him, but not without knowing exactly what books he had and considering them on an individual basis. The laws had been passed by people seeking to protect other kinds of Dark artifacts by introducing as much confusion as possible. Right now, that was serving him well.  
  
“And I asked earlier whether what he practiced was really necromancy,” Potter said again, as patient and challenging as before. “If he brought someone back to life, indisputably back to life, that doesn’t match the legal definition.”  
  
“How would  _you_ know the legal definition?” asked a witch with an upturned nose. Draco knew that she was related to the Greengrass family somehow, with that nose, but not her name.  
  
“I know some things have changed in six years, but I looked things up.” There was a spark behind Potter’s eyes and in his words, although for the most part he kept the tone of his voice mild and pleasant. “I knew that I would find myself on trial when I came back, that the Ministry wouldn’t accept me the way it should.”  
  
“Did you think that no one would ask you any questions, Mr. Potter?” Madam Fairmore had her chin propped on one hand and was considering Potter as though he was a new book she had never read before.  
  
“I knew I would be asked,” Potter said. He hadn’t folded his arms. He didn’t need to. He could draw attention by the way he stood, by the way he  _shone_. Draco hoped there wasn’t any Legilimens in the room at the moment focused on him. He would sound ridiculous. “You would have to know that I was the real person. And you would want to know what Malfoy had been doing.  
  
“But I also knew that you would probably  _dislike_ the fact that I came back to life.” He almost purred that word, which meant everyone in the room had to wonder about all the other ones he hadn’t used instead. “To say the least. Therefore, I prepared myself as well as I could for what I was going to undergo. And yes, I would use the word trial to describe this right now. From the way you’re looking at me and talking to us to the questions you keep asking.”  
  
“We have the right to question Professor Malfoy about his necromancy,” said Madam Fairmore.  
  
“You do,” Potter said. “But you haven’t said one word about whether he’s a hero for having raised me back up, or whether he’s just made himself bloody inconvenient.” There were more gasps and mutters over the use of the curse, which made Draco wonder again about how shallow the society was that they lived in. “After all, dead, I was your symbol. Alive again, I’m an inconvenience, aren’t I?”  
  
Madam Fairmore’s lips quivered, and she raised a hand, silencing the shouting that had begun without effort. Draco was beginning to sense how lucky they had been to come in on a day when she was the leading member of the Wizengamot, responsible for proposing most of the decisions and conducting the interrogation.  
  
“You’re saying things that most people leave to lie in the ashes,” said Madam Fairmore. “Making them burn real fire. That could be dangerous, you know.”  
  
Potter met her stare for stare. He seemed to have drawn in the calm around him again. Draco didn’t think he would swear now. “I know it could be. I’ll undergo whatever tests I need to prove that I’m  _me_ , and alive again. And I’d like a new wand, by the way. Could that be arranged?”  
  
“If you are who you say you are,” said Madam Fairmore, carefully adjusting her position in her chair, “then we would give you one, of course. Perhaps pay for it out of Ministry funds. We owe you a debt we can never repay.”  
  
“You can repay it,” Potter said, voice suddenly dulcet. “I’ll stay out of politics and say whatever you want in public about my return. I might leave the country after this. I don’t know how much I’ll like to be a spectacle in Britain instead of an ordinary person.”  
  
Madam Fairmore blinked, then inclined her head again. “I think I know what your price will be.”  
  
“Do you?” Potter stretched out one arm as if pointing the way towards the brighter future that he had just offered the Ministry. Draco found it hard to breathe, he was so caught up in the drama in front of him. “Then why don’t you say it? I find that I’m getting tired of saying things that immediately get protested against.”  
  
Madam Fairmore nodded, then turned back to the chairs around her as if she and not Potter was the one who had decided to make the announcement in the first place. “Mr. Potter wants Professor Malfoy cleared of all charges. Perhaps not cheered on, but to have it acknowledged that he committed no crimes of necromancy. Perhaps with the  _surrender_ of certain books,” she added, one eye on Draco, “it can be accomplished.”  
  
That was enough of a direct address to him that Draco found it nearly as easy to answer as it would be if she had asked him a question. He nodded. “I’m certainly agreeable to that. I’ll give you all of them and even give you the names of the places I acquired them.” Since he was still under Veritaserum, they could hardly doubt his word.  
  
Madam Fairmore watched him unblinking, nevertheless, as if not convinced of that, before leaning back and giving a nod that was probably meant to come across as gracious. But Draco could see her eyes, and also knew how unyielding it was.  
  
“Giving up the books will help greatly,” said Madam Fairmore, not taking her eyes from his face.  
  
Draco accepted the silent admonishment:  _And you were both lucky that I was here._ It was true. He had already decided as much.  
  
Madam Fairmore turned back to Potter. “You’ll pose for the photographs? You’ll submit to the tests that I want the Healers to do, to confirm that you really are alive and who you say you are?” She ignored the snort that Draco heard bubble out of his own nose as the Veritaserum began to loosen its hold, a little. If Potter hadn’t been alive, could he have passed all those wards around the Ministry that were meant to detect the presence of the dead? They would fire up and glow even in the presence of a vampire.  
  
Potter smiled. “You’ll grant me a wand back? You’ll let Professor Malfoy alone for any crimes that he may have committed to assist in my resurrection?”  
  
Someone from the back of the Wizengamot began to protest. Madam Fairmore, who either had eyes in the back of her head or a long knowledge of her colleagues, said simply, “Do you want to come up here and take over the leadership position for today, Grampus? I remember that I’m only holding it today because you wanted next weekend off, but of course pleasure must yield to necessity.”  
  
The voice shut up. Madam Fairmore nodded to the Auror who had already administered the antidote to Potter. “Give it to Professor Malfoy.”  
  
Draco gasped aloud as he swallowed the antidote, and turned to Potter. He would have expected him to be studying Madam Fairmore, or talking over what his first public show on the matter would be, but instead Potter was watching him.  
  
“Are you all right?” he demanded, in a low voice.  
  
Draco swallowed again, and said, “I’m fine. The antidote always chokes me like that, a little.” He ignored the Auror who tried to say something about how that proved the Veritaserum hadn’t worked. “Thank you, Potter.”  
  
“I find it odd that you call each other by name without honorifics,” said someone in the crowd.  
  
But neither they nor their words might have existed, as far as Potter was concerned. He only met Draco’s eyes, and his smile was bright and shining and contented. “You’re welcome, Malfoy.”  
  
Draco didn’t understand exactly why he had become one of the people Potter would fight for, but he intended to enjoy it.  
  
*  
  
 _He gave me everything back._  
  
Harry was thinking of that as he recited the lines he and Madam Fairmore had agreed on in front of a group of reporters, Aurors, Ministry officials, random wizards pulled in from Diagon Alley, and everyone else who had wanted to come and see him. It meant that people Harry considered friends and hadn’t told yet would learn about it first this way. He regretted that. But he hadn’t felt ready to go and see them at Ron and Hermione’s house yet, and he hadn’t wanted to answer all the  _questions_.  
  
He only wanted to start getting the semblance of his life back together, and ensure that Malfoy wouldn’t be punished for helping him. That had been the goal for today. Tomorrow, he would think of Ginny and all the other people he had yet to meet.  
  
The Ministry’s official position was that Harry had managed to cling to life because he loved Hogwarts and the wizarding world so much. That was why his shade had stayed in the Forest, rather than because not all of him had been trapped with the Horcrux in the place beyond the world he had made to guard Voldemort. And the body they had laid to rest in his tomb was only a sham, a glamour, because the Ministry had been embarrassed to admit that it couldn’t find his real one. In  _reality_ , they insisted, Harry’s body had simply lain in a sheltered place deep in the Forest, for years, while he slowly recovered.   
  
Harry had wondered if most people would question why he hardly looked any older, but he saw no sign of it in the dazzled faces that lifted towards him. They wanted to believe the story. They thought, if their hero came back to them, of course he should look the way he had when he “died.”   
  
Soon the stories would spread that Harry Potter could conquer even death, that he had the mysterious Power the Dark Lord Knew Not, that he was back to life simply because he was better than Voldemort in every way.  
  
But in the meantime, while he mouthed his lines, Harry’s gaze drifted to Malfoy. He stood modestly back, mostly out of sight behind the shoulders of Aurors, and watched the crowd. Or Harry.  
  
 _He gave me everything back._  
  
The sunlight on his skin, the colors of the robes swirling around Harry, the hand of Madam Fairmore steady on his shoulder, the taste of breakfast still in his mouth from this morning, the stone beneath his feet, the way he breathed, the rustle of his hair against his neck…  
  
Malfoy had acted puzzled, a few times, when Harry did things, like staying with him instead of going to Ron and Hermione’s house. Or when he let Malfoy touch or look at him as if they had been friends before he—left.  
  
But Harry didn’t know how else to express it, to show what he felt. What he  _owed,_ kind of, but it was more than that. How did you repay someone who had not just saved your life but given you back life itself, sight and sound, the whole world?  
  
You didn’t. You couldn’t. Harry might not know a lot because of the six years he had been away, but he knew that.  
  
Which meant that he would, instead, do what he could to share that life with Malfoy, to protect Malfoy from the consequences of giving it to him, to help him deal with any questions he had about it. Harry was good at protecting people.  
  
It was time to remember that he could protect more than the soul-shard of Voldemort that had obsessed him for so long.  
  
He glanced at Malfoy again and saw that his head was lifted, his eyes locked on Harry’s face. Harry smiled back at him, and felt something warm and soft steal along the edges of his being, flickering like flame on the edge of a piece of paper.  
  
Maybe he could remember other things that he was good at, too.


	3. Meetings at the Burrow

"Harry. I don't believe...no, I believe it. I just don't  _believe_ it."  
  
 _Well, that's promising,_ Draco thought, but he kept his face bland as he stepped back and let Ginny Weasley come up to Harry. She was staring, and Draco wondered if she realized she was doing it. Harry, who was almost exactly her height, took her hands, giving his own wry smile. Draco relaxed a bit. He thought he would know if Harry became intolerably uncomfortable, and then he could intervene.  
  
There were other people in the room who might already be that way, of course. Ginny herself. Her husband, standing back with a glass in his hand and a very hard expression on his face. The Weasley matriarch, who stood with her hand pressed to her mouth and tears in her eyes. Weasley the Original and Granger, who looked as though they desperately wished no one would ask them about why they'd known first.  
  
"Yeah, it's me, Ginny." Harry squeezed her hands. "I can't promise that I'm exactly the same. Six years guarding part of Voldemort's soul changes someone. But I'm me, and I'm back."  
  
Ginny abruptly hugged him. Draco, his patience honed further by teaching even than by Potions training, remained still, and saw Harry close his eyes. But he could easily have got away if he wanted to, and he didn't want to.  
  
 _His choice, his desires._ For Draco, those were still paramount. Harry had wanted Draco to come with him to the Burrow even though Draco had been sure that he would rather meet the Weasleys alone. And as long as he wanted to be embraced and kissed and questioned and shaken, then Draco wouldn't intervene.  
  
" _Harry_." The Weasley matriarch seemed to have overcome her doubts, and she staggered forwards now and embraced Harry in turn. Luckily, Ginny had let him go first. Draco thought he might have been smothered otherwise. "It's  _really_ you?"  
  
And she began to cry into his hair.  
  
Draco held back a grimace and turned to Ginny's husband. Dean Thomas gave him a pale, strained smile. "It's strange, isn't it?" he asked quietly, his eyes going back to Harry's face. "I used to dream about this. Wondering if it was possible that Harry hadn't died after all. But I never thought I would actually  _see_ it."  
  
"It's not that strange," Draco said. "I used the Elder Wand to bring him back exactly as he looked then. There wasn't much else I could do. It's remarkable enough that the Wand had the power for  _that_. If I'd asked it to age him, I don't think it could have complied."  
  
Thomas gave him a faint smile. "Sure, but it's still strange to see him looking exactly the same. Younger, and everything." He seemed to decide he had said too much, and turned away to commune with his glass.  
  
Draco considered not intervening, once more, but in this case, he thought he could make things more comfortable for Harry later, without Harry having to do much himself. "He doesn't want to take her from you."  
  
Thomas's head twitched towards him. "What?"  
  
"He doesn't want to take her from you," Draco repeated patiently. Sometimes he thought he would lose his temper with Gryffindors not because of their wild emotions, but because of how many things they needed repeated. "He was eighteen when they were in love. But he's not that now in mind, no matter how he looks. I promise, he won't care that you're married. He might even be glad. It'll resolve some questions that would otherwise be awkward."  
  
Thomas spluttered, and his cheeks turned red. "You can't just  _say_ something like that, Malfoy!"  
  
Draco did have to smile then. Sometimes, acting like a Gryffindor could be gratifying. "Why not? Because I'm a Slytherin and the lot of you don't expect it? There doesn't seem to be a reason otherwise."  
  
"Because no one talks about first love and lost love like that!" Thomas's hand was tight around his glass now. "Do you know how long it was before I could talk to Ginny about Harry? And now I have to accept that she's going to feel conflicted."  
  
"She can feel conflicted all she wants," Draco said coolly, "but she'll stay  _married_ to you. Harry's not about to demand she get a divorce. He doesn't want her to. He doesn't want to be married to her."  
  
"Why not?" Thomas asked simply. "Anyone would be."  
  
Draco paused, and chose his reaction. He chose to regard this as a touching proof of a husband's devotion and one that upped the chances of Thomas and Ginny staying comfortably hooked, rather than self-evident idiocy. "He doesn't think the same way anymore. You heard him. Six years guarding a shard of soul..."  
  
Thomas shivered, but his gaze was still wondering on Ginny's back, as she sat down as close as she could get to Harry with her mother still hugging him and began to chatter to him. "She always had a crush on him for being a hero, then. And you don't get much more heroic than giving up six years of your life to save the world."  
  
"I agree," Draco said mildly. It, after all, fit with his wish to have Harry honored for what he had done, so he wouldn't tell Thomas that he also thought it foolish almost beyond endurance. "Still, she's had, what, four years of being married to you?"  
  
Thomas nodded. "This might push everything awry again, though." He had decided to brood, from the gaze he fixed on his cup. "It was two years before she would agree to marry me. She said she was still in mourning."  
  
Draco silently asked the ceiling with his eyes why he had been chosen to play Gryffindor relationship counselor.  
  
But he knew the answer.  _Because this should make things easier for Harry, and I would do anything for Harry. It doesn't matter if it makes sense. It matters that it might help him._  
  
"She hasn't been in mourning for all those years, though, right?" Draco asked. He knew the answer, but Thomas was staring at him as if this was an entirely new concept, so Draco also knew he had to go slowly. "She doesn't wake you up in the night sobbing about him?"  
  
Thomas's face flushed, but he grinned almost in spite of himself, it seemed. "You don't need to know what she wakes me up in the middle of the night for."  
  
Draco held up his hand in a warding gesture. "I agree, but you can tell me without needing to offer a lot of detail. She doesn't do that?"  
  
Thomas shook his head, still weirdly focused on Draco. Well, if he wasn't watching Harry's every movement for some sign of an intention to grope Ginny, that would do its own bit of good.  
  
"Then she won't suddenly do it now," Draco said softly. "Let her have the pleasure of welcoming her friend and lost hero back to life. Don't interfere in that, and don't tax her with being jealous. It'll resolve itself."  
  
Thomas looked reassured, but he still muttered, "Easy for you to say," as he turned back to the embracing marathon. "You don't have someone here who's your whole life."  
  
 _It's not easy,_ Draco thought, and leaned back against the wall, blending into the wood again as he watched the Weasley family converge on Harry.  
  
*  
  
Molly finally let go of Harry, wiping her eyes. Harry smiled at her. He wasn't sure that he would be able to breathe anytime soon, but for her to still love him that much, and not panic or wring her hands the way that some people in the Ministry had...that was wonderful.  
  
"I'm going to go make you some treacle tart," Molly told him, and bustled off to the kitchen.  
  
Harry grinned, and turned to George, who had a bell in his hand and a contemplative look on his face. Harry rolled his eyes and held out his hand for the bell. "Only because I've been gone six years, and it's you," he told George.  
  
"Thank you," George said, with a prim little smile belied by the gleeful tone in his voice, and touched the bell to the center of Harry's palm.  
  
Harry's whole body seemed to ring, his teeth jarring in his head and his ears rattling and bouncing. He leaned back, wincing and gasping, and shook his hand. "What's that? A prank to turn Death Eaters' heads around on them?"  
  
"I've never got the chance to test it on an actual Death Eater," George said, "but good guess. I invented it mostly because I wanted to know what it was like to be inside a bell, and then rung. I think it succeeded, don't you?"  
  
He looked up at Harry, his eyes bright and blazing--and a bit of sadness along the edges of them. Harry reached out and clasped his wrist so hard that George winced, but didn't stop looking at him.  
  
"I would have brought him back for you if I could," Harry said quietly.  
  
George sucked in enough air to make his lungs scream, and then nodded without releasing the scream that Harry thought he'd been preparing. "It's all right," he said with equal softness. "I know you would have, and that means I can forgive you for not being him."  
  
He leaned forwards and knuckled his hand into Harry's hair until Harry's eyes watered. "Welcome back, little brother."  
  
He walked away to the kitchen, where his mother was calling for help, and Harry smiled and turned back to Ginny, who he still hadn't had a proper conversation with.  
  
Ginny looked at him with a trembling lip and an even more trembling smile for just a second before she looked away.  
  
Harry sighed and reached for her hand. She gave it to him, but she kept her face averted, her breathing low and slow and regular. Harry knew that she was trying to control her tears, although he hadn't heard her do it more than once or twice when they were together.  
  
"I'm sorry I couldn't come back earlier," he told her softly.  
  
Her head snapped around, and her eyes focused on him. "I  _tried_ ," she snapped, as if Harry had accused her of something. "I went to the Forbidden Forest and cast every single spell I could think of on that stupid shade, trying to stop it. I researched necromancy and tried to call up your soul. I clipped a lock of hair from your corpse and tried to summon you back with that. I  _tried_."  
  
"Is that why I feel like a hank is missing on this side?" Harry muttered, and tugged on his hair on the left. But Ginny refused to look up or smile, and Harry sighed. "I would have come back for you if I could. But Malfoy was the one who had to figure out the exact right combination of things to do, and then that the Deathly Hallows were involved."  
  
Ginny glanced up, blinking. She was still lovely when her face shone with interest, Harry thought absently. "He found them? But no one could find the Resurrection Stone."  
  
"He found it," Harry confirmed. "I don't know exactly what spell he was using to find it." That was one of the things he hadn't asked Malfoy yet because everything else had been so much more important. "But he did."  
  
Ginny bowed her head. "Then I could have found it if I had searched harder."  
  
Harry's mouth tightened a little. He had done his share of reassuring and coaxing, but he didn't know what to say to this.  
  
His gaze crossed Malfoy's. Malfoy still leaned against the wall, and his stance was as relaxed, his face as open, as they had been when Ron and Hermione were in his rooms at Hogwarts and discussing the way that they should handle Harry's resurrection. He nodded to Harry without much moving his head.  
  
 _I can do anything when he's here._  
  
Harry turned back to Ginny. "You couldn't have, not without the right spell," he said gently. "And then you would still have to have the knowledge of necromancy and the conviction that my shade was more than just a remnant of the battle. Hell, McGonagall herself never managed to get me back. I think Malfoy only managed because he wasn't used to the shade and more prone to question it."  
  
"I should have tried harder," Ginny said. "Instead of giving up."  
  
Harry caught and held her hands. "I wouldn't have wanted you to give up on living your life because you thought you should only try to bring me back," he said softly. "The same way I wouldn't have wanted you to never marry Dean because you thought you should be faithful to me."  
  
Ginny's lip trembled again, and her head bowed. That was the heart of the problem here, Harry knew. Ginny had been perfectly happy in her marriage to Dean, but now she had to question herself and wonder if she could have had Harry back, the one she had been in love with, if she'd just pushed a little harder and questioned more.   
  
What bothered Harry was that he just didn't  _care_ that much.  
  
He wanted Ginny to be happy, but he had given up on the notion of her only being happy with him. He hadn't thought about much other than Voldemort and guard duty and the way he'd died in the last six years, but some emotions had come roaring back to life the minute he opened his eyes here, as if they had been doing nothing but stay frozen like rivers under ice, and had assumed their proper place when he had resources to think about anything else. His friendship with Ron and Hermione and his pleasure in seeing the Weasleys again were like that.  
  
But some emotions just hadn't come back. He would always wish Ginny well, but she had moved on and married someone else, and he had moved on in his head to become...  
  
Well, someone else. Someone different. He thought he still deserved to be called Harry Potter, but he didn't know how much else he could claim as an identity with his past self.  
  
"You did what you needed to do, to be happy and live," Harry told her. "I could never resent that."  
  
Ginny snapped her head up and gazed intently into his eyes. Harry smiled back. He and Ginny had always understood each other, even if Harry sometimes hadn't realized the source of it, as when Ginny reminded him that he hadn't been the only one possessed by Voldemort. They could understand each other now.  
  
Ginny sniffled. "I don't deserve a friend like you."  
  
Harry  _did_ shove her, this time, and almost sent her spilling off the couch because she hadn't expected it. "There's a level of self-deprecation beyond what I'll put up with," Harry told her firmly, as she looked at him in surprise. "And this is it."  
  
Finally, that convinced her to smile and lean over to kiss his cheek. "Thank you," she whispered. "You have no idea how much this means to me."  
  
"I might," Harry said, and squeezed her hand before she moved away and let Bill and Fleur come up to him. Harry hadn't had a chance to meet their children, and he thought the night would probably be full of learning names and stories about first words. Victoire was six now, but evidently still shy, from the way she hid behind her mother at the sight of him. Four-year-old Dominique seemed much bolder, wavering up to Harry and examining him as if she had heard there was something different about him and wanted to see what it was.  
  
Harry picked her up and made faces at her until she giggled, and even Victoire leaned around Fleur to look at what was happening. Then he turned back to Bill and Fleur, and started catching up.  
  
*  
  
"I don't  _know_ how to thank you for bringing him back."  
  
Draco had suspected this was coming for some time, the Talk with Weasley. Dinner had finished, and Harry was still in the kitchen with the rest of the family and Granger, most of them talking a mile a minute now that the initial constraint was past. Draco could understand why and how they wanted to catch Harry up on all their lives, but it was a little overwhelming to be in the middle of, particularly when he didn't share most of their memories.  
  
Therefore, when Weasley had glanced at him and motioned with his head towards the garden, Draco had been glad enough to walk out with him, even knowing what was coming.  
  
Now, he cast a Warming Charm on his hands and turned away from his inspection of the frost on the grass to an inspection of Weasley's profile. "You don't need to thank me beyond the ordinary words," he said mildly. "I know why I did it, and it wasn't for you."  
  
Weasley walked a few steps further, his face locked in a frown so deep that Draco knew more was coming. He refrained from staring up at the sky and sighing, but he wanted to. He managed to restrain it to a single stamp on the frost-ruined grass, which crackled and bent in response.  
  
"You might consider what it would do to Harry if he heard you saying things like that," Weasley said. "I know we aren't  _your_ friends, but it would help if you behaved like we were."  
  
Draco turned around and stared at him. "And are you going to act that friendly towards  _me_?" The question was spontaneous and open, the way that Gryffindors were always urging him to be, and from the side of him that only Harry had seen up until this point. There was no reason, Draco thought, for Weasley to turn that red and start stammering.  
  
Draco snorted and shook his head. "No, you aren't. You just think that I should grant you the benefit of the doubt for anything you want to do."  
  
"I didn't say that at  _all_ ," Weasley snapped. "I only want to make it clear that we aren't going to disappear from Harry's life."  
  
"I think it should be  _clear,_ in turn, that I'm not asking you to," Draco said, and lowered his voice. The thing he could think of that would hurt Harry the most at the moment was coming out the back door and hearing this conversation. "I stayed out of the way while Harry had his reunion with you. I didn't even mean to sit beside him at dinner, but he was the one who decided I should." He paused, but Weasley looked at him with a blank face that could have concealed a multitude of sins, so Draco nailed the point home. "I'm not going to disappear from Harry's life, either."  
  
Weasley squinted at him in frustration. Draco squinted back.  
  
"You have a job," Weasley said. "A job that I know you haven't been neglecting, because I wrote to Harry. How do you think he feels sitting in your rooms all day?"  
  
"He's not sitting there and staring at the walls," Draco said. "He's reading books and back editions of the  _Prophet_ to catch up on all the history he missed, and he's ordering all sorts of food from the house-elves to get used to having a sense of taste again. He even takes baths and sleeps because he couldn't do that where he was." He sighed when Weasley didn't move. "I know that he talked about that in his letters to you, so don't act like it was a surprise."  
  
"You  _read_ his letters?"  
  
"No, of course not," Draco said. "He reads them aloud to me, and talks about what he's writing about. He wants to."  
  
Weasley stared at him with his mouth slightly open. Draco managed to clasp his hands behind his back and turn his face away before Weasley could notice the smile sneaking across his mouth, but it was a near thing.  
  
"What does he  _want_ with you?" Weasley whispered, not sounding as if he really had much expectation of hearing that answered. "Why are you so important to him? I'm never going to understand that."  
  
Draco rolled his eyes. "Funny. You understood it well enough that your sister had a crush on him after Harry rescued her from the basilisk."  
  
There was silence, and spluttering, and then Weasley began, "That's  _entirely_ different. Harry doesn't have a crush on you!"  
  
Draco laughed. "Trust you to pick up on the  _least_ important thing about that statement. I don't know what Harry's feelings about me are, exactly. When he's ready, he'll tell me. But I saved his life, and I don't think that he's had many people play the hero for him, instead of the other way around." He turned back and spoke seriously, since Weasley seemed to require that, no matter how silly Draco thought it was. "Don't drive me away, Weasley. He needs me, and I won't stand for being driven away, anyway."  
  
Weasley sighed so moodily that Draco expected to see a great cloud of steam rising up from him, but at least he shook his head and gave in--with bad grace. "We worry about Harry."  
  
"So do I," Draco replied promptly. "He hasn't even wanted to go and get a wand yet, even though he talked about that more than once. And it's an overwhelming situation for anyone to get plunged into."  
  
Weasley considered him from the corner of his eye. Draco turned his head as the door from the back of the Burrow opened.  
  
Harry stepped out into the night, looked around for them, and smiled. The soft, melting, tender smile that overwhelmed his face when he was reading a letter from his friends, or looking at Draco while they spoke together at one of their private meals.  
  
"Fine."  
  
"Hmmm?" Draco turned his head towards Weasley, a little, without taking his gaze off Harry.  
  
"When you look like  _that_ at him," Weasley grumbled, "I reckon I can't disapprove  _too_ much."  
  
Draco shrugged and went on looking at Harry whatever way he was looking. Harry was the most important thing here, not either of them.  
  
Harry strode across the garden to him, nodded to Weasley, and took Draco's arm, steering him familiarly towards the Apparition point outside the garden. "Goodbye, Ron. I already said goodbye to the rest of your lot. Tell your mum that I don't need sixty pounds of treacle tart, all right? She'd have to borrow owls to carry it, anyway."  
  
Weasley's face relaxed, and he called, "I'll be sure to tell her."  
  
Draco closed his eyes. He had Harry's warmth and close presence moving beside him, the sureness of his stride, even the height of his head exactly at his shoulder. All of it was what he wanted.  
  
"Malfoy? Is something wrong?"  
  
Draco opened his eyes, smiled down at Harry, and said, "Nothing at all."  
  
Harry blinked a little, and then smiled back.


	4. Meetings in the Light

“We have to discuss what we’re going to do about your further schooling, Mr. Potter.”  
  
“We do?”   
  
McGonagall frowned, but Draco didn’t think Harry was trying to be insolent. He was very familiar, by now, with all the common twists of Harry’s expression, and this was the widening of the eyes and blinking that meant he honestly didn’t see what needed to be settled. It only confirmed for Draco that he was right when Harry turned to him for help, cocking his head.  
  
“Yes, we do,” Draco said, striking out a middle course. He was seated in the chair beside Harry in the Headmistress’s office, his hands folded on his stomach and his slouch just a bit pronounced. He hadn’t wanted to seem as if he was going to take authority away from the Headmistress, but now he smiled and nodded at Harry. “You never received your NEWTs, and it would be hard for you to have a normal life in the wizarding world without them. Or any kind of a life, really,” he added, because he was sure that Harry was opening his mouth to announce that he didn’t care about  _normality_ , and he would never have that anyway.  
  
“Oh.” Harry chewed his lip a second and turned to the Headmistress. “But I don’t have a wand. I need to get one first.”  
  
McGonagall’s eyes widened in turn. “But I thought that…I mean, your friends said something about your holly wand being broken, but I thought I’d misunderstood them.” She made no reference to the Elder Wand, for which Draco was grateful.  
  
Harry shook his head firmly. “It really did break. And the only wand that could have repaired it is gone now.” He stared thoughtfully at the portraits behind McGonagall’s desk. The portrait of Dumbledore was empty, Draco noticed. Perhaps that was a good thing. Harry had shown no interest in talking to it, although Draco knew that Harry had gone to his final death mostly on the Headmaster’s orders. “So. Maybe I should be thinking about a journey to Diagon Alley.” He turned his eyes expectantly to Draco.  
  
“You could Floo,” Draco said gently, even as he stood. It was Saturday, so he had no classes to occupy him, but he did wonder if it was a good thing for Harry to be as dependent on him as he had become. From McGonagall’s frown, she clearly didn’t think so.  
  
“But I want to Apparate, and I can’t do that without a wand.” Harry looked at him with melting eyes that would cause a lot of havoc if he ever figured out how bloody seductive they were. “Please?”  
  
“You also need an Apparition license, Mr. Potter,” McGonagall, ever the stickler for rules, pointed out sharply.  
  
“Yes, but that also doesn’t matter without a wand,” Harry said, and smiled at her, and didn’t seem to notice the way she stared at him. Draco didn’t think he meant to be insolent this time, either. It was just the way Harry spoke to adults, as if he wasn’t a young student anymore, which was true. He held out his arm to Draco. “Shall we go?”  
  
“I can’t Side-Along Apparate you from inside the school.”  
  
Harry blinked, flushed, and lowered his arm. “Sure, I knew that,” he said. “I was only testing to make sure that you were paying attention. And you were. So we can go now.”  
  
Draco darted a glance at the Headmistress, who was watching them with her hands folded on the desk and a much more relaxed expression on her face. She shook her head when she caught his look. Draco concealed a shrug and turned back to stretch out an arm to Harry. “It doesn’t matter that we can’t Apparate from inside the school. I can still walk you down to the entrance hall.”  
  
Harry flushed, but didn’t turn around and check to see which portraits were watching them, or even how intently the Headmistress was doing it. He nodded instead, a little haughtily, and said, “Thank you, Professor Malfoy.”  
  
Draco held his face straight, all the way down the moving staircase and to the entrance hall. He kept thinking Harry would drop his arm like a hot ember the minute they were out of sight, or make some kind of joke, and Draco was ready to meet it with a joke of his own.  
  
But Harry did nothing like that. He was still blushing, but he kept walking steadily, hand in place on Draco’s arm, head lifted to the point that someone walking past them could have looked up his nostrils.  
  
Draco shook his head in wonder, and enjoyed the light weight of Harry’s hand.  
  
*  
  
“I suppose you know that I don’t make new wands much anymore? So you’ll have to take your choice from the wands that are already in the shop.”  
  
Harry suppressed the desire to retort that he had been gone from the world for six years and hadn’t known that Ollivander wasn’t crafting wands anymore. He just nodded and looked away from Ollivander, who had gloves over his hands, up at the shelves and shelves of boxes on the walls. A few drew his eye, made of a bright pale wood. He gestured towards them. “What is that wood?”  
  
“Birch,” Ollivander said, without looking away from Harry. “I don’t know that those wands would do at all for you, Mr. Potter, I really don’t.”  
  
“I want to look at them anyway,” Harry said, trying to add a bit of command to his voice. He didn’t think he could achieve, yet, the calm expectation Malfoy had that his will would be done. Harry had gone along to a few Potions classes under Malfoy’s Disillusionment Charm, and the way he taught was impressive. Students’ taunts and misbehavior only earned a faint, disappointed look and detention in an impassive voice.  
  
Harry thought he could do worse than imitate Malfoy, in a lot of ways. He looked out of the corner of his eye now and saw Malfoy standing at his ease under one of the stacks of boxes, looking up at one of the same birch ones Harry had gestured at.  
  
“If you will,” said Ollivander, and began to pull boxes down from the shelves with flicks of his own wand, grumbling under his breath the whole time. Harry decided that probably had more to do with Malfoy’s presence than it did with him.  
  
Malfoy was so  _quiet,_ Harry thought, as he prepared to pick up the first box. It seemed as though he had decided in his own mind, long ago, that there was nothing worth getting excited about, and that enabled him to stand back and smile at the rest of the world when they started getting excited.  
  
The first wand, which looked like it was made of walnut, was ungainly in Harry’s hand, and cold. He didn’t even have time to wave it before Ollivander snatched it away, and shoved it back into its box. Harry hummed and opened the next one.  
  
But no, it wasn’t true that Malfoy was perfectly detached, was it? Harry had seen him passionate enough in that strange station between life and death where Harry had guarded the Horcrux. He had snorted, made faces, and argued with bitter precision as to why Harry didn’t need to spend the rest of eternity guarding the soul-piece.  
  
This wand was made of hickory, and while it felt a little better to him than the walnut one had, Harry waved it around and found that it whipped back and forth too much for his liking. He handed it back to Ollivander before Ollivander could try to take it from him, and opened the third box.  
  
If Harry was one of the few people who could pull that much emotion from Malfoy, then Harry thought…  
  
He thought it was a bloody fine compliment, was what he thought.  
  
This wand was made of ebony. Harry held it up and examined his faint reflection in the black wood curiously. His face shone back, with paler cheeks than normal. Harry took a deep breath and held up the wand, pointing it straight at the ceiling, while he thought as hard as he could,  _Lumos._  
  
The light that arose had a faint, shadowy tinge around the sides, but that didn’t matter. The sensation of performing real magic for the first time in six years rushed through Harry, and he felt as though he had leaped over a waterfall and was growing wings on the way down. His breath came faster and faster, and he nearly sagged to his knees. He might have done it, and never mind Ollivander, if not for Malfoy beside him.  
  
Malfoy’s faint, proud smile kept him on his feet, and made him think about what he could do to earn more approval. Harry swallowed with delight and turned to Ollivander, waving the wand around. “What’s its core?”  
  
“Phoenix feather,” Ollivander grumbled, still watching him. “It does seem that you’re doomed to have wands with phoenix feather cores.”  
  
Harry managed not to let his smile falter. At least he knew that the feather in this particular wand couldn’t possibly have come from Fawkes, since Ollivander had told him that Fawkes had only ever given two feathers. “Well. Tell me how much it costs, and I’ll pay for it.” He glanced at Malfoy. They hadn’t stopped at Gringotts before they came here, but they had the other day, after the Ministry had accepted that it was really him and he knew he could have access to his accounts.  
  
Malfoy, smiling now with an air of quiet amusement, pulled out the bag of Galleons. Ollivander said something about ten, and Malfoy put them on the counter, not compelling Ollivander to touch his hands.  
  
 _There’s something delicate about him, too,_ Harry thought, as he raised his wand and cast a Shaving Charm on his chin. He had a tendency to get stubble there when he forgot about the spells, and he was hoping that he wouldn’t look too ragged.  
  
From the feel of it, the spell shaved him precisely as close as it was supposed to, and the pleasure of the magic rang through him like a chime. Harry beamed and strutted out onto the street in Diagon Alley, Malfoy following behind.  
  
“It feels good to have a wand again?”  
  
“You could tell?” Harry glanced over his shoulder. He thought he could read Malfoy fairly well, but he didn’t know that the reverse was always true. Malfoy seemed to miss the most obvious things on Harry’s face, sometimes.  
  
“I noticed that you looked as if you were eating treacle tart.” Yes, there was still pride in the gaze that Malfoy let rest on him. And something else, too, something that brought warmth surging into Harry’s cheeks and made him look away and clear his throat.  
  
“Well, of course it feels good, after that long without casting magic,” Harry mumbled, knowing he sounded embarrassed and had no reason to and would probably cause Malfoy concern, but unable to stop it. “And the wand is obviously mine. It doesn’t feel exactly like the holly wand, but it would be weird if it did, wouldn’t it?”  
  
“Yes, I think it would,” Malfoy said thoughtfully. He glanced around Diagon Alley. “Is there anywhere else that you want to go while we’re here?”  
  
“Yes,” Harry said. “I want to go get some ice cream, and then I want to sit and talk.”  
  
Malfoy turned his head towards Harry and blinked, once. He had long eyelashes that seemed to cast a lot of shadows on his face. “I thought we’d had ice cream the other day. Or did I forget to order some from the house-elves?”  
  
“I meant that I want to have some at Fortescue’s—or whatever other place replaced it,” Harry added, remembering that Fortescue had been captured or disappeared during the war. “I’d think you would understand that desire. Didn’t you want to do things like that after the war? Ordinary things, no matter what kind of food you could get from the house-elves?”  
  
Malfoy nodded. “Of course I did. And the war didn’t end for you until a few weeks ago.” He turned in the direction of Fortescue’s. Apparently the new ice cream shop was at least in the same place, if it didn’t have the same name anymore, Harry thought, following him. “As long as you don’t mind being stared at.”  
  
Harry snorted. “They would have stared at me if I’d survived in the ordinary way, too. I reckon I might as well get used to it.”  
  
*  
  
 _Does he have the least idea how remarkable he is?_  
  
By now, Draco had given up flinching when those kinds of thoughts came to him. He would have had to cut his eyes out and cut off his ears not to notice how remarkable Harry was, all the time. How he walked through the world as though he was dealing with it, despite the fact that no one had ever had to deal with something like this before. How he beamed with clear and simple pleasure when he grabbed his wand.  
  
How he ate ice cream, nearly burying his nose in it and mumbling his way through a scoop of mixed chocolate and vanilla, munching as small drops escaped down the corners of his face.  
  
Draco sipped his own, mostly-melted strawberry ice cream and held his peace about the mess Harry was making. Now that he had his own wand, he could cast his own Cleaning Charms.  
  
People gaped at them through the window, and inside the shop, and from the tables. But Harry didn’t seem to take the least notice, and when it seemed as though someone might come over and be rude, Draco only had to catch their eyes and shake his head a little. Most of them retreated meekly. Others did so when they realized that Harry wouldn’t pay any attention to them.  
  
 _Maybe other people wouldn’t think that about him,_ Draco thought, and turned back to Harry.  _But I do._  
  
“This is one of the best things I’ve tasted,” Harry announced, surfacing from the chocolate. “Ever. Not just since I’ve been back.” He leaned against the back of the chair and looked around curiously. “They’re still calling it Fortescue’s even though Fortescue never came back?”  
  
Draco nodded. “I think a cousin of his runs it. I don’t know whether the name is the same, but he wanted to carry on the tradition. And I think a lot of people after the war wanted some suggestion of continuity and normality.”  
  
“I understand that,” Harry muttered, in a voice that came from the heart, and then he turned around. Draco found himself unexpectedly pinned with a gaze that seemed as sharp as the one that had pierced the members of the Wizengamot. He swallowed unnecessarily, and persuaded himself not to hide behind his ice cream bowl. “Now, tell me about you.”  
  
That respect was unexpected enough that Draco did allow himself a blink. “I haven’t? I thought you knew all the important details already.”  
  
“About how you got me back, and why you were willing to fight for me in the Ministry.” Harry leaned forwards insistently. “I want to know more about how you got your Potions mastery and why you came back to teach at Hogwarts.”  
  
Draco toyed with the spoon in front of him for a second, taking note of its unusual coldness from the ice cream. Why was it so hard to meet Harry’s eyes? “I could tell you what my friends think,” he said. “That I’m reliving Professor Snape’s life and trying to make up for his early death.”  
  
Harry’s airy gesture dismissed Pansy and Blaise and their whole stack of pretensions. “I want to know what you think.”  
  
“All right,” Draco said. He supposed that he could share it. It had just remained private for so long that he had it all arranged the way he wanted, and he’d thought no voice but that of his thoughts would ever speak it.  
  
But here was Harry, so intent and interested that he was almost shoving the table back into Draco’s stomach as he leaned on it. And Draco couldn’t help the little thrill that seemed to run up the middle of his forehead, and had nothing to do with ice cream headache.  
  
“I knew that I needed some firm point to stand on after the war,” Draco said. “I was reeling. I was lost. There were all these things that everyone was telling me I could count on, but they were all old things. I couldn’t brace myself on them because the war changed the world for me so much that I had two pieces of my life, before and after.”  
  
“But you were good at Potions before the war, too.” Harry’s eyes were cutting into him again.  
  
“Yes, but not in the way I am now,” Draco said. “I’ve got more training now, sure, but I can also go deep inside them and know that no matter what’s going wrong with the world outside, I can make things right in that little enclosed space. It was my mastery that taught me that, and I chose it because I thought Potions was a quiet subject, and one I could master.”  
  
Harry toyed with his dish. “Did you want to master them, or the world, or yourself?”  
  
Draco caught his breath. It was the sort of question that his friends had never thought to ask.  _Yes, Harry grew up when he was gone from the world._ “All of those,” he said. “If there was one thing I could do well, then I could stop feeling so worthless. And the world would stop spinning around me. And while I don’t agree with my friends that I’m living Professor Snape’s life for him, there was satisfaction in proving him wrong.”  
  
“How could being good at Potions prove him wrong? I thought he always praised you.”  
  
Draco shook his head. “He had a real passion for them, and he told me in private that my skill was all technical accomplishment but no real  _art_.”  _A subtle art,_ Severus had called it, and there had been emotion in his voice that Draco had never heard elsewhere. “He thought I couldn’t get good at Potions, or as good as he was, because I wasn’t that emotional about them.”  
  
“What did you care about the most?” And Harry whispered the words, as though he had no idea what Draco would say, and it was of utmost importance that he know.  
  
“Then? My life, staying alive, and my family staying alive.” Draco smiled and shook his head at the look on Harry’s face. “Remember, I wasn’t like you. I wasn’t a hero. I didn’t have a greater goal beyond myself. My goal was just to see tomorrow.”  
  
“I’m not criticizing you for that,” Harry said, and Draco had to roll his eyes. “No, really, I’m not. Most of the time during the war, my goal was just to stay alive, too. And to kill Voldemort, but I had to do that to stay alive.”  
  
“You know we’re different,” Draco couldn’t help saying, in a chiding way. He understood Harry’s impulse to make them equal, and honored him for it. Harry wanted to believe that because Draco had done one thing that required a lot of effort, rescuing Harry from the prison his soul was in, he had been a hero in other ways, too. But it wasn’t true. “You always had a grander purpose in mind during the war. I didn’t until after the war.”  
  
“I was a scared schoolboy more than half the time.” Harry clenched his fist. “And I resented Dumbledore _so much_ for making me walk into the Forbidden Forest.”   
  
“I know,” Draco said. “But you went and did it, and that’s the important thing. I was all talk and no action until after the war. And I think I would have gone on being that way, except I told you, I had to have something to cling to. Potions became that thing.”  
  
“And proving Snape wrong,” Harry said, grinning at him. “I think that’s an admirable goal.”  
  
Draco laughed. “I won’t say there’s not a lot of Slytherin in me still. I think that’s a reason I came back to Hogwarts, too. I wanted to be an even better Head of Slytherin House than Snape had been, and show that I could care for the students, too. Maybe this has been all about showing that I can do things well, better than people would ever have thought if they believed I just cared about myself.”  
  
Harry sighed and slurped up a little more ice cream. “I wish there was a way I could take some of your reputation. So many people think I’m a great hero.”  
  
“You are,” Draco said.  
  
“Not you,  _too_.” Harry pouted at him, and Draco decided that he could find that enchanting as long as he never told anyone about it. “I mean it. I don’t want to be seen as a great hero. If people thought I was in the middle, normal, selfish, then I wouldn’t feel so bad about acting selfish.”  
  
“I didn’t know that you were feeling bad about it.” Draco reached out and poked Harry in the middle of the chest. “If that’s the case, then stop. You did more than anyone should ever be able to ask you to.”  
  
“I know, but…” Harry frowned. “I want to take what I want. I want to act the way I want. That’s one reason why I got so irritated when McGonagall asked if I was coming back to Hogwarts to take my NEWTs. I don’t like it when people have expectations of me like that. They don’t own me. She didn’t bring me back. She doesn’t have the right to say what I should be doing.”  
  
“If you become a student, she will.”  
  
“That’s another reason not to do it.” Harry folded his arms. “But then I also feel guilty about staying away for so long, and I remind myself that I  _look_ eighteen, and it’s no wonder that people keep trying to pick up exactly where we left off.”  
  
“It’ll take them time to get used to you,” Draco agreed. “But just like you did with the Weasleys, you don’t need to lean back and let them think whatever they want. You need to speak up clearly and gently with them the way you did with Ginny. It would have been more cruel to let her go on thinking that you were going to come back and marry her.”  
  
“It would have been cruel to Dean, too.” Harry caught him with his eyes again. “Don’t think I didn’t notice you talking to him. Thank you.”  
  
Draco merely smiled and said nothing. There was no way that he could say that he was happy to do anything Harry wanted without it coming off as soppy, and probably more pressure on Harry than he wanted at the moment.  
  
“Right,” Harry said thoughtfully. “So I’ll take what I want and live like a normal person, as much as I possibly can.” He nodded. “But I need something to cling to, the way you did with Potions. One thing that’s consistent.”  
  
“Hogwarts could be that for you,” Draco suggested. “I don’t want you to think that I believe that’s the most important thing you could do, but McGonagall’s right that you could use the NEWTs, and the routines of school are predictable and soothing, in a way.”  
  
“There’s also bad memories associated with Hogwarts. I don’t think I could just be a regular student again.” Harry poked his bowl even though there was no more ice cream left. “Besides, I already found my constant.”  
  
“You did?” Draco tried not to sound wounded, because that would put more pressure on Harry that he didn’t need, but he couldn’t help wondering why he hadn’t noticed Harry changing his attitude. “What is it?”  
  
Harry smiled at him. “You.”  
  
That opened a moment for Draco that was like falling through space, but he managed to clear his throat and shake his head. “But—but I have changed since we knew each other before the war. And you said you needed something that hadn’t changed.”  
  
“You haven’t changed since I came back. You keep protecting me and inspiring me and making it easier for me.” Draco had to wonder whether Harry’s eyes had been like this before the war, and if anyone could bear their direct gaze, if so. Maybe Granger and Weasley had had more practice. “You’re my constant.”  
  
Draco swallowed. The words rang little chords in his soul that hadn’t rung since he was eighteen years old, and had chosen Potions, and he picked up his bowl and stared into it.  
  
Harry reached across the table and clasped his hand. “I would ask if you wanted to be,” he said, “but I think you want to be, and you’re upset for some other reason. Tell me.”  
  
“I’m not  _upset_ ,” Draco said, and then wondered if that was true. But no, against the shining light of Harry’s eyes, it was true. Draco was startled, but not upset. He just wondered… “I wonder if you’re wise to put so much trust in me.”  
  
“Is this the part where you tell me that you only brought me back because you were secretly scheming to get your hands on the Potter fortune all along?”  
  
Draco snorted with laughter, and noticed that Harry was still clasping his hand. Draco tried to pull his arm back. Harry raised his eyebrows and kept his hand in precisely the same place, his fingers tracing the veins and little pulses in Draco’s wrist.  
  
“I don’t blame you for trusting the person who rescued you,” Draco said. He had meant to speak the words strongly, confidently, but they lapsed into little more than breath. He met Harry’s gaze, saw that wouldn’t work if it was by itself, and swallowed. “I mean—I  _do_ think that I could be your constant. But what happens after you leave Hogwarts? I plan to stay as Potions professor and Head of Slytherin House for a while. I have students there who also need me.”  
  
Harry paused as he thought about that. Draco watched the tousle of his hair, and admired—not so much the way the hair sat on Harry’s head as the fact that he was thinking before immediately arguing or agreeing.  
  
“I think that I can have you as a constant even if I can’t see you every day,” Harry said. “And I hope that you’ll agree.”  
  
“Well, you could have found someone else by then.”  
  
Draco thought the sentiment reasonable enough, given that Harry had already started reconnecting with his friends and would have to find someone to date who wasn’t a Weasley, but he didn’t expect the way that Harry fired up in seconds. “Not to take your place,” Harry all but hissed, leaning forwards and shooting the words at him like lightning bolts. “Someone else I could trust, maybe, but not someone else who can be what you are to me.”  
  
Draco swallowed. It was necessary, no matter how nervous it made him look, with his throat so dry. “What am I to you? Besides your touchstone?”  
  
Harry looked at the table. Then he muttered something that sounded like, “No, damn it,” and stubbornly looked Draco in the face again. “You’re someone I can trust. Someone I would trust above so many other people. My defender. The person who didn’t laugh at me when I forgot that you can’t Apparate out of Hogwarts. All those things.”  
  
Draco licked his lips and tried to find his voice. “And—you can’t see someone replacing me as any of those?”  
  
“Maybe one,” Harry said. “Not all of them.”  
  
Draco looked at him. He had no words to define this moment. Harry wasn’t one of his Slytherins, and he wasn’t a friend, and he wasn’t the rival he had been before the war. Nor was he simply the man Draco had persuaded to come back to earth, or rescued. That word didn’t take account of the several arguments he’d had to have with Harry, or the way that Harry’s Deathly Hallows had basically fixed his spirit back in his body themselves.  
  
But he knew that he didn’t want to leave this moment.  
  
*  
  
 _That’s it,_ Harry thought, as the warm feeling pulsed through him and settled, and left him with an acceptance nearly as complete as it was strong.  
  
 _I’ll have to call him Draco now. It’s ridiculous to call him anything else._


	5. Gentle Light

"But, Mr. Potter," said McGonagall, and really she did sound reasonable, and if it hadn't been Harry under discussion, then Draco would be inclined to agree with her. "You must realize that you  _cannot_ simply tell me that you don't wish to be a regular student here, and then discuss your standing as a student here. That is not the way it works."  
  
Harry leaned back in his chair and raised his eyebrows. Draco was distinctly impressed with him so far. He hadn't raised his voice, hadn't whined, hadn't indulged in any of the objectionable behaviors that McGonagall so obviously expected from a teenager and thought would happen with him, too. "Really? Then you admit that I'm a regular student, the same as anyone else?"  
  
McGonagall hesitated.  _Caught in her own trap,_ Draco thought, not without sympathy. They'd been talking about extra security measures to keep reporters and so on from spying on Harry, and Draco had agreed that those were a good idea.  
  
But McGonagall couldn't act at one and the same time as if security measures would be necessary, and then that Harry's course of study would be the same as any other student's.   
  
"It sounds as though you're trying to resist discipline and detentions, or argue that you shouldn't be subjected to them," McGonagall chose to say at last. "And really, I cannot allow that to stand, not when you might still break the rules."  
  
Harry sighed a little. "You're treating me as though I was an ordinary student, with parents or guardians, who insists on breaking rules for no reason. I'm an adult, Headmistress. In terms of the wizarding world, and in terms of the amount of time I spent defending that world."  
  
McGonagall sat back a little in her chair, her eyebrows rising. "So now we come to the real reason," she said, and she sounded almost amused. "You see yourself as an adult and not a teenager."  
  
"You're making a mistake if you don't see him that way," Draco warned her quietly, and not just because he could see Harry opening his mouth to make the same argument. He didn't want this to devolve into a shouting match, and it might if Harry said it. Draco respected his maturity, but not always his skill at phrasing things.  
  
McGonagall studied him with squinted eyes, then turned back to Harry. "You see yourself as an adult, Mr. Potter?"  
  
"I do," said Harry. "If you want to have me in your school, it has to be on my own terms. I can't and I won't put up with rules that are designed to protect children from the consequences of the real world. I've been in that real world long enough now that I can't give up living as part of it. And if that's not possible at Hogwarts, then I'll go off and have private tutors, and only visit here when I want to see Draco." He glanced up at the portrait frames behind McGonagall's desk. "Or other people, perhaps."  
  
"I do want you to stay at Hogwarts," McGongall said quietly, sounding a little hurt. Draco thought she probably wanted to spare Harry from some of the nastier parts of living outside the school's protective wards, not just keep a celebrity for her own, and he could applaud her for that. "But I can't make an exception of the kind you're talking about."  
  
Harry studied her, then dipped his head. "Then private tutors of the kind I was talking about, until I get my NEWTs." He turned to Draco. "Can I hope that I can live with you, and you'll tutor me in Potions?"  
  
" _Wait_ a moment," McGonagall began, sounding startled.  
  
“You’re welcome to live with me,” said Draco. “But still, I think that you might be discarding the option of Hogwarts too quickly.”  
  
“I won’t act as though I’m the same as everyone else,” said Harry, and carried on looking at Draco. “I’m not. People have been telling me that since I was eleven years old. I finally believe them. I’m not, and I won’t act as though I am.”  
  
“There are people who would question the kind of favoritism that you want me to use,” said McGonagall, her hand on a piece of parchment on her desk. Draco wondered idly if was a petition for Harry to stay here or something. “The Board of Governors, for example.”  
  
Harry snorted. “So they don’t believe that I’m Harry Potter, or they don’t believe that I saved the world? Or both.”  
  
“Your return is making enormous shock waves in the wizarding world. I believe it would be proper to give people time to adjust to that, emotionally, and one way they can is if they see you behaving as someone ordinary.”  
  
Harry sighed at the ceiling and turned around to look at Draco. “Would you have time to tutor me in Potions yourself, or would you recommend someone else?”  
  
“Someone else, probably,” Draco said, keeping his eyes averted from McGonagall’s face so he wouldn’t start grinning. “My heavy class and marking load would keep me from paying as much attention to your education as I’d want to. One of my previous Potions masters takes students he likes or who impresses him, not just those who are good at Potions. I’ll write to him and see what he says.”  
  
“ _Mister Malfoy._ ”  
  
“Professor Malfoy, I thought,” said Draco, facing her. “Unless you intend to sack me for supporting Harry.”  
  
McGonagall blinked, then sagged back in her chair. “I was only trying to make points that I thought made sense,” she said.  
  
Harry smiled at her. “And so someone wouldn’t accuse you of unfairness or bias. That’s a good reason. But the wizarding world is never going to think I’m ordinary, Headmistress. I could be back for a hundred years and they wouldn’t think that. Working with that view is the best course open to me, instead of trying to pretend that what happened didn’t happen.”  
  
McGonagall looked at Draco. Draco nodded. He was no better a responsible adult than Harry was, but if McGonagall wanted to know whether Draco really supported Harry in his plans, Draco could give her his reassurance that he did.  
  
“Very well, then,” said McGonagall. “I will allow you to attend classes and turn in essays and sit exams—as long as you can demonstrate the knowledge to be allowed in NEWT classes.”  
  
Harry’s smile seemed to come from inside the same soft light that Draco had first seen his shade in. “Thank you.”  
  
“What will you do about subjects like Potions where you do  _not_ have the NEWT knowledge?” McGonagall persisted.  
  
“See first if I do,” said Harry, and glanced at Draco. “I think that the current professor will let me sit a preparatory OWL exam and determine whether I should be accepted into the class from there. If not, I’ll find a tutor.”  
  
“I fear it will be lonely here without any students you knew, except perhaps some as first years.”  
  
Harry shrugged. “I can see my friends regularly, and I can visit with Draco. And I’d like to stay in the Room of Requirement, too, if you don’t mind, Headmistress. It would probably disrupt a lot of things if I was to go into Gryffindor Tower now, with a group of boys who knew each other from the time they were first-years.”  
  
Draco expected McGonagall to object to that most of all, but perhaps because Harry had won his first battle, she nodded and leaned back in her chair. “You’re probably right. I hope that the classes will go well. I don’t want students staring at you in the middle of them and concentrating on you instead of their classwork.”  
  
“I can always go and find private tutors if you think that’s going to be a problem.”  
  
McGonagall shot Harry a look that made Draco relax. She wanted Harry as a student in her school more than she wanted to avoid criticism. Everything would be all right as long as that was true. “You need not. I will make an announcement to the students tomorrow, and explain what kind of behavior I expect from them.”  
  
“And professors can reinforce you,” Draco added mildly. “I suspect that Flitwick and the others who are still here from the time Harry was a student will be glad to have him back and want to protect him from the staring.”  
  
“And the others I’ve hired are no-nonsense. Like you, Professor Malfoy.” McGonagall looked at him over her glasses. Draco smiled back. “Good. Then it’s settled. I expect to see you in the Great Hall bright and early for breakfast, Mr. Potter.”  
  
As they left the Headmistress’s office, Draco thought of something they hadn’t addressed. “What House table are you going to eat at?” he asked Harry.  
  
“I was thinking of alternating,” said Harry. “I don’t really feel much like a Gryffindor anymore. If I sit with everyone in turn, then they’ll all get used to me, and they probably won’t be afraid of me. It’s hard to be afraid of someone when you’ve seen him with crumbs all over his face.”  
  
“Clearly we should have arranged an incident like that with the Dark Lord.”  
  
Draco realized a moment after he made the joke that he perhaps shouldn’t have , but Harry gave him that spring-like smile again. “You’re the only one who would dare laugh about it with me. Thank you.”  
  
Draco relished the jolt of warmth that came to life in his chest, and flooded his veins with summer wine. He wasn’t sure what to do about it, but perhaps he didn’t need to do anything. Perhaps he could enjoy it.  
  
*  
  
Harry scowled at the exam in front of him. How should he remember what ingredients the Draught of Peace had? It wasn’t like he’d exactly had the chance to brew it much in the past few years!  
  
But then he sighed. This was the challenge that he had wanted Draco to set for him. And Draco had adapted an OWL exam, not made him sit a NEWT one. Besides, Draco was on the other side of the office, frowning at the essays he was marking, but lifting his head every time Harry so much as shifted in his seat. Harry knew he wasn’t being unfair.  
  
“Is something wrong?” Draco asked now. It was probably the sigh.  
  
“I’m just not used to this anymore,” Harry told him, and then plunged back into the list of ingredients before Draco could question him further. He wasn’t used to it, but he would  _get_ used to it. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his mental life marching in circles around the place in the mental King’s Cross where the shard of Voldemort’s soul lay, either. He  _would_ get his NEWTs.  
  
Including his Potions NEWT. Harry had sat in one of Draco’s classes now, and while he wouldn’t say that Draco was an easy teacher, he was miles better than Snape. He didn’t try to sabotage people, he didn’t insult them; he only quietly shook his head or offered advice in a voice that was almost neutral.  
  
It made his students want to please him, Harry had noticed. And Harry wanted to please him as well, although for different reasons.  
  
With some concentration, he managed to wrestle the ingredients of the Draught of Peace from his reluctant brain, and then went on to the next question, about what would happen if one combined fluxweed with foxglove. By the time he answered that one, Draco was setting up the cauldron for the practical part of the exam.  
  
Harry wrote in the response to the final question—he was almost sure it was right—and then stood up and walked over to the cauldron. He took a second to just smooth his palm down the side, luxuriating in the feel of the metal. It was cold and heavy and real in a way that nothing in the white-shrouded world of his soul had been.  
  
Draco allowed him to do it, watching with a half-smile that Harry knew concealed perfect understanding, even if it didn’t look like it, before he picked up a wire brush. “You’re going to brew a Blood-Giving Draught,” he said.  
  
It was the harder and longer-lasting version of a Blood-Replenishing potion. And at the moment, Harry’s mind felt absolutely blank when he tried to concentrate on it.  
  
“You may begin any time,” said Draco, and stepped away from the table of ingredients, going back to his desk.  
  
Harry sighed and faced the ingredients. He knew that everything he needed was here, if he could just figure out what that was and what order he needed to use them in. He picked up a vial of opal dust and laid it down near the cauldron. He vaguely remembered that that needed to go first.  
  
But did he combine it with liquid ingredients or sift it in as the base? He had to clutch at the edges of the table to calm himself down.  
  
Draco didn’t look up from making his essays. Harry glared at him wildly for a moment. Even the lines of his hair looked calm, not to mention the lines of his shoulders.  
  
There had to be a way to get past this. Draco wouldn’t issue him an impossible challenge. And it would be unfair if he did, since the other students would have had to brew easier potions to get their NEWT class.  
  
So there was a way he could figure this out. Harry began to move around the table, studying the maple leaves there, and the foxglove, and the spray of flowers that he didn’t recognize, and the diamond, and the special enchanted mortar and pestle that he reckoned was to grind the diamond down—if he needed it—and the piece of what looked like bone. When he picked it up and felt it, it was bone. He’d felt it enough times in other Potions classes to know.  
  
He laid it gently down and picked up the mortar and pestle. He could remember something of making a Blood-Replenishing Potion, and he knew that the Draught was similar to that. And the challenge wasn’t impossible. He kept telling himself that, and some of his panic receded.  
  
Harry ground the leaves first, into pulp and paste. Then he paused, and filled the cauldron with water, the way he would if he was preparing a Blood-Replenishing Potion.  
  
Draco never looked up while he was doing that. Nonetheless, Harry was sure he would spring to his feet and move in an instant if either Harry or the lab was in danger.  
  
Harry’s shoulders dropped and his spine seemed to uncoil as he realized that. That actually really reassured him. Especially since he wouldn’t have trusted Snape to do anything but react too late in such a situation. For all that Snape said he was concerned about explosions in the classroom and preventing them, they happened on a regular basis. But Draco hadn’t had one yet, from what he said.   
  
And from what the other students said.   
  
Harry concentrated on combining the leaf pulp with the opal dust. In the end, he glanced at the diamond and decided to leave it out. He knew it was used to give potions transparency, and long-lasting effect. But the Blood-Giving Draught had to be used almost as soon as it was made. The diamond was probably a distraction, unlikely to be used in it.  
  
The flowers, he shredded and laid aside. He might have to use them, but he was going to try and figure out what they were first.  
  
The foxglove was poisonous. Was he  _sure_ he was supposed to use it? Harry sniffed at it gingerly, and then nodded. Yes, he remembered the same smell from an ingredient in the Blood-Replenishing Potion. He just hadn’t been sure that ingredient was foxglove until now.  
  
Then he paused. He hadn’t thought that he had that good a nose, let alone that good a memory for smells.  
  
It was ridiculous, but he shook his head, refusing to turn back and question his instincts now. They had brought him this far. They could bring him more luck, and let him actually brew the potion.  
  
He pulped the foxglove, too, and combined that with the water. Then he gave it lots of stirs. He couldn’t remember the exact number for the Blood-Giving Draught, so he did the number he would have for a Blood-Replenishing Potion. The liquid inside the cauldron was purple, which Harry thought it was supposed to be.  
  
 _Thought_. But he was trying mostly not to do too badly, because he knew he couldn’t do everything perfectly.  
  
He glanced at the blue flowers. So far, everything he had done was an almost perfect replication of the Blood-Replenishing Potion. But one thing he  _did_ remember well was that the Blood-Giving Draught was more potent. The flowers were the only thing—excepting the diamond, which he really didn’t trust—that might make that difference in potency.  
  
So he reached for them and picked up the largest leaf, and tossed it into the cauldron.  
  
There was an immediate reaction, a hissing and a bubbling as though the potion was trying to climb the sides of the cauldron. Harry flinched, but noticed that Draco was sitting behind his desk and frowning down at a piece of parchment as though nothing was wrong.  
  
So nothing must be severely wrong, or Draco would already be between Harry and the cauldron, wand in place to defend him. Harry knew that like he knew he had been wrong to stay in the in-between world guarding the last part of the Horcrux.  
  
He relaxed with a long unwinding of his limbs again, and checked the potion. It had stayed in the cauldron, and now it was bright blue, or maybe indigo. Anyway, the color had drifted away from purple.  
  
And that triggered a memory of a picture in one of his textbooks. That was what the Blood-Giving Draught looked like.  
  
Harry snorted a little to himself and reached for the rest of the flowers. He doubted this potion would go perfectly, but he would give it his best effort.  
  
For Draco, even more than for himself. He didn’t want anyone saying that Draco had let an inferior student into his classroom because of life-debts or because he had tried to bring that student back from the dead or for any other reason.  
  
*  
  
Draco knew that something had gone right when he saw Harry reach for the irises and start shredding them more finely, using the knife off to the right when he couldn’t get them fine enough for his own instincts.  
  
He had still made a few mistakes; it had taken all Draco’s strength to keep himself clamped to the chair, rather than shooting up to defend Harry, when he had flinched back from the potion. But he had done a lot right, and had ignored the diamond. He  _could_ have crushed it with that pestle and mortar, but it would have been exactly the wrong addition to the potion. Either memory or instincts or something else had saved him.  
  
 _Or just intelligence_.  
  
Draco gave the sort of hidden smile that he’d become expert in over the years, when showing too much happiness could be as dangerous as showing none, and bent over his parchment again. Snape would have laughed that particular estimate to scorn. But Snape wasn’t here, and Draco was, and he could observe.  
  
It wasn’t just that he admired Harry and wanted him to have what he wanted. He really did think that Harry was a good deal smarter than Draco had ever given him credit for when they were both students.  
  
And it was time to let that shine.   
  
Harry spent a lot of time with the irises, experimenting with whole petals and shredded ones and crushed ones, until he went with his first instinct and used the shredded ones. By then, he was almost wholly brewing the potion, with both hands and with his mind, continually checking on the progress of the potion in the cauldron even as he prepared further ingredients to go in.  
  
Draco paused. For some reason, Harry reminded him of himself and other Potions mastery students he had seen in his studies, more than he did of the students at Hogwarts. Of course, part of that was relative age—he did think Harry was an adult, no matter what anyone else said—but it was something else as well. It wasn’t like Harry had acquired Potions skills when he guarded the Horcrux.  
  
Maybe it was the quality of focus. Draco knew most of his students were distracted, even during exams, with worries about friends and family, other classes and Quidditch, the people they were dating and House points. A lot of them found that impossible to put aside for an hour or more. One of the few things he had admired about Granger when he was more short-sighted was her ability to do that, and show what really mattered, what was in front of her. You had to do that in Potions, or you would never get anywhere.  
  
Harry wasn’t an expert, but he already had a skill that was extremely hard to learn. That made Draco want to smile and celebrate.  
  
And  _that_ made him wonder why Harry’s success was so important to him. It wasn’t just the chance to have him in class.  
  
Draco flexed one hand, which had cramped around the quill, carefully, so that his motion wouldn’t distract Harry. If anything  _could_ distract Harry right now; he was incredibly fixated on the cauldron in front of him, checking the ingredients and maybe the color against some invisible chart in his head.  
  
Well, he knew the answer to why Harry’s success was important to him. It was impossible to think that he could have heard Harry’s declaration that Draco was his constant without being affected by it.   
  
That just made him wonder what he wanted to do about it. Teaching Harry would be a first step. Perhaps he should follow the advice he had just mentally given Harry, and focus on what was in front of him, instead of attempting to see beyond it.  
  
Harry abruptly gave a little huff, a sound that made it seem as if he was trying to expel poisonous fumes from his lungs. Draco stood up in spite of himself, but Harry turning towards him with a smile that made him relax.  
  
“I think I did it,” Harry said. He didn’t tilt the cauldron; perhaps he knew that would disrupt the potion’s still fragile consistency. He stepped back instead, and let Draco come over and examine the color and viscosity  _in situ._  
  
It wasn’t a perfect Blood-Giving Draught; Draco would have wanted to give it a few more stirs and add some more iris petals for greater strength, and he would have hesitated to give it to a child, since they often needed the potions brewed by an expert. But it was pretty bloody nice, given that Harry had initially looked as if he had no more idea how to brew the potion than how to fly without a broom.  
  
“Very good,” said Draco.  
  
“I know it is.”  
  
Draco looked up, about to tease Harry about his lack of modesty, but Harry’s eyes were fixed intently on his face. “Your smile told me so,” he said.  
  
Draco hadn’t been aware he was smiling. He hadn’t been aware that he was so caught up in the drama that was Harry’s silent exam until he felt the tension leave his shoulders. He hadn’t been aware that he was reaching out a hand to Harry until Harry caught it.  
  
Harry squeezed it once, and let it go. Draco felt the burning imprint of his fingers for a long time afterwards.  
  
The only consolation—or reward, perhaps he should think of it that way—was that Harry’s hands shook a little as he took the cauldron away to dump it, and he kept glancing back, as if he wanted to make sure that Draco really was right behind him and not about to vanish out the door now that the exam was done.  
  
 _Focus on the thing in front of you,_ Draco told himself sternly, when he might have opened his mouth and said something stupid.  
  
And right now, there were the essays to mark.  
  
Draco went back to his essays and worked, hearing the companionable sounds of Harry working across from him.


	6. Light of Their Lives

“So, are you  _really_ Harry Potter?”  
  
Harry counted to twenty under his breath. Ten wasn’t enough, even though he had been anticipating this question since he sat down at the Gryffindor table this morning. Then he turned around, making sure to take a big bite of his bacon first. The taste of it in his mouth was still a miracle.  
  
The students watching him were first-years. One had big enough eyes and a shiny enough face that Harry was reminded of Colin Creevey. He swallowed hard, and coughed a little as the bacon went down the wrong way. Having Colin’s death confirmed when he returned to the world had been a blow, if a minor one compared to some of the others he’d suffered.  
  
“Yeah, I am,” Harry said simply. Draco had told him that morning, before they came into the Great Hall, that Harry could eat breakfast in Draco’s quarters if he wanted and avoid all this. But Harry had insisted on his original plan of eating with each House-table in turn. So really, he had brought this on himself.  
  
“Wow!” The kid looked ready to fall over backwards. Another one, a girl this time, leaned forwards, brown braids swishing.  
  
“Why did you stay away for so long?”  
  
“Because I was guarding a piece of Lord Voldemort to keep him from coming back to the world,” Harry said, and saw the wave of fear at the name pass around the table, making them leap and start and cry out and stare over their shoulders. Harry held back the impatient sigh that wanted to slip out. Yes, they were silly to be scared of the name. But he wasn’t going to scold them for it.  
  
On the other hand, he wasn’t going to hide what he had gone through, either. He wasn’t going to pretend to be ordinary when he wasn’t.  
  
He did glance over his shoulder at the High Table. Draco was sipping tea from a thin cup and discussing something with Professor Flitwick. Harry relaxed. He would be watching if he thought there was a chance that Harry was in danger, the way he always watched.  
  
“Weren’t you scared?”  
  
It was the girl with brown hair again. Harry turned back to her. “A lot of the time,” he said honestly. “But sometimes I was bored. You know how you get bored when you do the same thing again and again?” The first-years nodded fervently, probably thinking of studying and repetitive essays. “It was like that. But then I would feel guilty for getting bored, because that might have let Voldemort slip past me.”  
  
More flinching, but they were getting used to the idea. The boy took over again. “Is there any chance that he’s going to come back now you’re here?”  
  
Harry smiled. “No. Before I left and came back to the world, I made sure that he was destroyed completely.” It was easier to say that than to try and explain something they wouldn’t understand anyway. Between the Deathly Hallows and the Horcruxes, there was already enough going on that Harry didn’t know if he could make it make sense for someone who hadn’t been there.  
  
The girl opened her mouth again, but the boy poked her in the side. “We should let Harry eat,” he said seriously. “We’ve already asked enough questions.”  
  
“ _You_ got to ask two,” said the girl, and turned stubbornly back to Harry. “Are you going to be a sixth-year or a seventh-year or what?”  
  
“I’m going to be a seventh-year,” said Harry. It was true that he hadn’t paid as much attention to his classes during his sixth year as he should have, focusing on Dumbledore’s “lessons” in Horcruxes and what Malfoy—Draco—was doing at the time, but he had passed the exams the professor set to be admitted into their NEWT classes. “I’ll be leaving at the end of this year.”  
  
The girl frowned. “At least you get to eat a lot of meals with us!”  
  
“Well, at lunch this afternoon, I’ll be going over to the Hufflepuff table,” Harry said, twisting and glancing over his shoulder to judge how the Hufflepuffs were looking at him. If they seemed really hostile, he wouldn’t try it, but they simply looked interested in his conversation. “And at dinner tonight, I’ll probably eat with the Slytherins.”  
  
“Slytherins?  _Ew!_  Why would you want to eat with  _them_?” The boy might actually have hawked and spat in the middle of his plate, Harry thought, only his parents had probably taught him better manners.  
  
“I was almost Sorted Slytherin, you know,” said Harry mildly.  
  
That made the boy and girl gape at him, and Harry added, “And I think that most Slytherins probably aren’t evil. They’re just cold because they think they have to be. But whether because they want to be polite or because they want me to know who they are and admire them, I bet  _they_ would have told me their names by now.”  
  
Both of them flushed, and their voices tumbled over each other so that Harry had to ask them to repeat the introductions a few times before he was sure that the girl was Mindy Downston and the boy Gabriel Thistle. Then he went back to talking with them in a more normal way.  
  
He did glance up at the professors again when he was getting ready to go to his first class, and found Draco watching him, calm and constant. Harry nodded back, glad that Draco didn’t think he was doing much wrong.  
  
 _If there’s any professor who would really know whether the students don’t like me, it’s Draco._  
  
*  
  
It was harder not to show favoritism to Harry in Potions than Draco had expected.  
  
On the one hand, it was simply a matter of keeping the desire to intervene in check. And while Harry would probably never be a Potions genius, he was brilliant enough at them. So Draco didn’t have to scold or whisper clues, and while Harry, partnered with a seventh-year Gryffindor named Heather Jewell, did produce a potion several shades of color off normal, it wouldn’t be enough to earn him less than an Acceptable.  
  
Far harder was holding in the urge to praise Harry, or touch his shoulder, when Draco saw him get something right.  
  
Draco had never thought of himself as someone to admire other people too much. Professor Snape had earned his admiration with his behavior during the war and his attempts to protect Draco, but only after he had died and the full story of all that he had been hiding during the war came out. Draco had resented him at the time.  
  
He had admired many of his Potions instructors, but only for their skill in their art. They might be greedy or charmless or lacking in personal hygiene. Draco could put up with it to learn from them. He just wouldn’t take them as role models.  
  
He liked his friends, he loved his parents, but he admired them less—far less, in some cases—after the war than he would have if he had never changed his convictions. And no matter how irritating Blaise and Pansy might be when they said that Draco was hiding at Hogwarts to reprise Professor Snape’s life, it was better than them suspecting the truth: that Draco couldn’t bear to spend as much time around them as he had when he was a child.  
  
His admiration for Harry was a living, breathing thing, a warm creature that he wanted to feed. He could do so in private, but the Potions classroom was the wrong context.  
  
He had known all that in advance, which should have made it easier to hold the admiration in check. He still had to convert the motion of a hand that would have patted Harry’s back into a grasp on a stirring rod that sixth-year Tamara Yeltsin was moving in the exact wrong direction.   
  
Draco then turned his voice into a series of murmured instructions to Yeltsin, who flushed a little and promptly attended to them. Draco deliberately kept his eyes away from Harry for the rest of the class, except when he made the rounds to check on all the potions and found Harry’s a little off-color. He nodded and offered the measured praise that he would for someone whose potion wasn’t exactly right.  
  
Harry’s partner, and the rest of the ordinary students, noticed nothing wrong. Harry himself looked at Draco with bright, intelligent eyes.  
  
Draco held his tongue in check until the class was over, and then murmured to Harry, “Mr. Potter. Come to my office tonight at seven, please.”  
  
Harry gave him a single piercing glance, and nodded.  
  
But what really made Draco’s day was the smile that Harry flashed him, unseen by the others, before he rejoined the flow of students outside the classroom again.  
  
*  
  
Harry knocked on the door of Draco’s office, biting his lip as he did. Was he here for detention? It was true that Draco hadn’t used the word, but Harry knew that his potion hadn’t been that well done, and he couldn’t even attribute it that much to his partner; he had simply had more trouble concentrating with people around him than he had in the silence of the exam in Draco’s office.  
  
He knew what Ron would probably say to that.  _You need to concentrate if you’re brewing in any situation. Especially if you want the Potions NEWT to be an Auror._  
  
Harry shrugged a little. He didn’t know if he still wanted to be an Auror, but even if he did, when he was done with Hogwarts, he wouldn’t be in Ron’s class or corps. That possibility had been destroyed forever by Harry staying behind with the piece of Voldemort’s soul.  
  
Before Harry could travel too far down the maudlin road, the door opened in front of him, and Draco’s light voice called, “Enter.”  
  
Harry blinked as he ducked into the office. There was a cauldron bubbling away over a fire in the center of the room, and on the table next to it were the same ingredients for the same potion that they had worked on in class.  
  
“Harry,” said Draco, and rose to his feet from behind his desk, his smile small, but genuine. Harry relaxed and smiled back. “Do you care to show me what you can do when you aren’t busy listening to compliments and giggles from other people?”  
  
“Compliments and giggles?” Harry asked blankly, tilting his head back to look at Draco. He feared to encounter some anger there, but Draco only looked calm, the way he had during Harry’s Potions exam.  
  
“Surely some of your classmates were giggling at having you back among them,” said Draco, and leaned against his desk. His face remained bland, but his words seemed important, if only because Harry couldn’t really understand them, and this was one of the first times he hadn’t understood something Draco had said since he came back. “And I heard a few distinct compliments on your skills and your eyes.”  
  
Harry shrugged. “As long as they don’t compliment my scar or my bravery, I don’t care that much. But I’m sorry they disrupted your class.”  
  
“Not that so much,” said Draco, waving one hand. Harry had the impression that he had relaxed further, though, some tension going out of his shoulders that had been there. “I can handle the class. I do think they impacted on your performance, though.”  
  
“Maybe they did,” Harry acknowledged. He had heard a few of the compliments Draco was talking about, and rolled his eyes at them, although he hadn’t thought they’d hurt the steadiness of his hand or the way he chopped ingredients. “How long do you want me to take to make the potion?”  
  
“As long as you would in an ordinary class.” Draco sat down behind his desk again and reached for one of the endless piles of essays. “Try to make sure that your attention to the potion is absolute, even if someone knocks on the door or comes in for a detention.”  
  
“Your confidence in me is touching,” Harry muttered, as he turned back to the potion and tried to figure out what the best strategy for attacking it would be.  
  
“I think it’s no less than you deserve.”  
  
Harry jerked a little and looked at Draco, but Draco was absorbed in the essays without it even seeming like an act. Harry had to shake his head and give up on attempting to stare him out of countenance.  
  
It was even nicer than the exam, though, being here with Draco, he thought. Draco was still a silent and strong support next to him, and there wasn’t the pressure to get things right so he would be let into the NEWT class this time.  
  
And it was a good distraction from the miserable failure that sitting at the Slytherin table for dinner had been.  
  
He’d tried, he really had. He hadn’t recognized any of the Slytherins at the table, not even the seventh-years who might have been in their first year when he was last out in the world, and so he’d simply sat down in the first empty seat and given them a friendly hello. But that student pulled her robes back away him as though he’d threatened to burn them, and the others had performed a collective shrinking back and turning away of heads.  
  
Harry had no idea what had upset them, his reputation or his former House or something else. He had stayed quiet throughout dinner, eating only what he’d already put in front of him, and no one had said a word to him or taken a glance at him. He’d left early, and not heard one gossipy sound from behind him, either. The Slytherins seemed to have decided that he didn’t exist.  
  
It had upset him more than he knew it was worth. So he couldn’t expect everyone to see right away that he had changed, and he couldn’t expect everyone to welcome him with open arms. He’d thought about asking what their problem was, but even phrasing it like that might have made them upset.   
  
He would sit with the Hufflepuffs and Gryffindors and Ravenclaws from now on, and only speak to any Slytherins who wanted to speak to him. Harry thought that if there had been one person was really friendly with him, they would have done something at the table, but instead, the Slytherins had presented a united front of disdain. There was no Slytherin who cared to be on speaking terms with him, so he would leave them alone.  
  
 _Except Draco._  
  
Harry turned his head, and met Draco’s eyes, unexpectedly. Draco had looked up from his pile of essays and was watching Harry in an unhurried way. Harry started.  
  
“Do pay more attention to your potion,” said Draco, in the way of chiding he had that didn’t sound like chiding at all.  
  
Harry nodded, and turned back to gathering the ingredients. Brooding on why the Slytherins had rejected him was silly, he decided firmly. They had a perfect right to do whatever they wanted, and so did Harry, including not sitting at their table again. It was a tiny incident in the middle of the life he was trying to rebuild.  
  
Not worth nearly as much as being good at Potions, or pleasing Draco.  
  
*  
  
Draco had to stop writing when he noticed that there was a pattern in his remarks. He liked to give each student unique feedback on their essays, and instead, he had used “Unfortunately” the last three times. He settled back in his chair and shook his hand out, resting his wrist.  
  
He’d expected Harry to take the opportunity for more conversation, but he seemed to have taken Draco’s last admonition to heart. He was concentrating solely on the number of stirs he gave the potion, even to an expert eye like Draco’s.  
  
 _He was worried about the Slytherins._  
  
Draco knew that was it, and more than that, he knew the reason that his House had turned their backs so comprehensively. They had settled into a world where people didn’t blame them for the end of the war the way they had expected. That had a lot to do with Harry disappearing mysteriously into the Forbidden Forest rather than returning and conducting some huge battle where the Slytherin students of the time would have had to choose where they stood. Their fading into obscurity, along with the Dark Lord, had been perfect as far as they were concerned.  
  
But now Harry was back, and now there was speculation in the papers and letters and constant public chatter about the exact way he had returned, and whether the war was over after all. And some people only needed that excuse to pick up their former suspicions about Slytherin House. Suddenly the obscurity that had protected them was being turned against them. Reporters who had never cared before were trying to pry into the state of their hearts concerning Harry Potter. Students from other Houses asked them what they thought about him. And they had to watch their own Head of House being close with him.  
  
Draco had dealt with every Slytherin who had come to question him in private, carefully and thoroughly. No, he wouldn’t favor Harry in class. Yes, Harry would have some privileges that ordinary students didn’t, because he wasn’t an ordinary student. Yes, he had been intimately involved in Harry’s return from death.  
  
Some of them had walked out of his office when they heard that last. Draco had respected their choices—he would respect their choices even if they chose to leave the school or never bring a problem to him again—but he wouldn’t have stepped back from rescuing Harry for any reason, once he was caught up in the problem and the solution. Not because of gossip from stupid people outside Hogwarts, especially.  
  
There was such a tangle of deeds and misdeeds and recriminations left over from the war, Draco doubted that they would ever be worked through completely. He would help the students who needed help, who asked him for help, who had problems that he could do something about. The others, he was wise enough to leave alone. And he wouldn’t insist that they sit with Harry at meals. He didn’t think Harry would try it again, anyway.  
  
But if any of them thought that the confusion swirling around Harry’s return was enough reason to  _hurt_ Harry…  
  
Draco’s fingers twitched towards his wand.  
  
That was a different thing. Most things concerning Harry were different.  
  
“Draco? I’m done.”  
  
Despite them being in his office, Draco knew that insisting Harry call him Professor Malfoy would simply backfire, lessen the trust growing between them. And Harry always remembered to call him by his correct title in front of the other students. That was the way it should be.  
  
Draco got up and circled around the table, inspecting the potion Harry had just brewed minutely. Yes, it was a delicate and cloudy white, the right shade. The Pervading Perfume Potion, used to combat lingering stains and smells, had a scent and color like lilies unless it was later altered by the addition of other ingredients.  
  
“You’ve done well,” he said, and bottled the potion with a tap of his wand on the edge of the cauldron. Harry looked impressed, and opened his mouth as if to ask how the spell was done, but Draco continued. “You’ve proven to me that you can brew under perfect, silent conditions. Now you need to show me that you can work well with other students.”  
  
Harry hesitated once, then asked, “Can I have a different partner?”  
  
“I don’t assign partners permanently.” Professor Snape had, in his NEWT courses, and so had some of Draco’s other Potions masters, but Draco considered it a waste of time. Some students would coast on their partners’ brilliance, others would be dragged down by their mistakes, and either way, they could fall into too comfortable a routine. “You’ll have to prove to me that you can work well with a variety of people.”  
  
“I want to do that anyway.”  
  
Seeing the way that Harry’s eyes had lit up and cast a whole new kind of light over his face, Draco decided that he had to say something else, something hard. “Harry. Are you doing this because you want to do well in Potions, or because you want to please  _me_?”  
  
Harry’s breath caught, and he looked as if he might retreat for a second. Then he squared his shoulders and said, “Something of both, I suppose. Can you live with that?”  
  
Draco touched one hand to his hair, about to rake it through, but lowered it again when he saw how intently Harry was following his movements, his moments.  
  
 _You’re my constant._  
  
Too late to push Harry away, to declare that it should never have happened this way, that he needed someone closer to his own age, which  _was_  Draco’s. Draco had known about the potential dangers when he agreed to let Harry stay here. And he watched the progression of the warmth in his own breath and belly with some understanding.  
  
“All right,” said Draco, speaking softly. “As long as you understand that I’m still Head of Slytherin House, and they need me. If it comes down to an individual student having a problem with you, this is going to place me in a very difficult position.”  
  
“Did it before, when someone from one of the other Houses had a problem with a Slytherin?”  
  
Draco hesitated again. “No. But you aren’t an ordinary student.”  
  
“And the reason that you asked me to come to your office tonight wasn’t for a detention.” Harry stepped towards him.  
  
Draco raised his hands. He didn’t know where they were going to come down, until Harry reached out and caught both of them and settled them on his shoulders.  
  
“There. Now, whatever trouble is going through your mind, we can face it together,” Harry said.  
  
Draco took a deep breath and looked him directly in the eye. “I meant it when I said that I would let Professor McGonagall sack me before I gave up on being with you. But if I’m staying here as a professor, I have to be an honest one. There can’t be anything more to it than just a professor and a student for now.”  
  
“As long as I’m a student here, and you’re a professor,” said Harry.  
  
“Exactly. Even if you do well in the class,” Draco added, out of an obscure fear that Harry might think impressing him in Potions was the way to his heart.  
  
Harry stepped back and laughed aloud. “I don’t think I’m ever going to be good enough in Potions to tempt you to break your word.”  
  
“You don’t need skill in Potions to be a temptation.”  
  
Draco had meant the words simply and sincerely, but the way Harry took them, they were more than that. Suddenly there was a way that he tilted his head and looked at Draco that was stirring, and the way he reached up and touched Draco’s left arm, above where the Dark Mark lay, was a touch that made Draco’s breath catch.  
  
“You were listening to what I said?” Draco seized Harry’s hand.  
  
“I was listening,” Harry said, and his words were as soft as a caress. “And what I’m thinking is that it isn’t long until the end of the year, when I won’t be a student any longer. If I pass my NEWTs—”  
  
“Don’t think you won’t,” Draco interrupted. Serious personal conversation or not, he wasn’t about to listen to Harry put himself down. “Of course you will.”  
  
Harry half-smiled at him and continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “ _When_ I pass my NEWTs, then I won’t always stay here. And you’re one of the few people who’s consistently accepted that I’m older than the age I look. Will your answer be the same then?”  
  
“You’re a temptation,” Draco acknowledged. He felt as though he was edging out on a rope above a pit, far more than he had been even when he was in the most difficult throes of his Potions master training, which was the time most comparable. His back felt slick with sweat under his robes. “Not enough of one to make me break my professional code.”  
  
“Because you won’t date students,” Harry said, his eyes soft and compassionate. “I’m only asking about the time when I’m no longer a student.”  
  
Draco half-shook his head. Harry was the one who had said  _date_ , but he felt the shock of the word in his own mouth.  
  
“Even talking about it makes it more difficult for me,” he warned Harry. “Please—hold back, don’t do that anymore, or I’ll lose what I value the most.”  
  
“The opportunity to have me around?” Harry shook his head in turn when Draco stared at him. “I know that only because it was the same thing I was thinking. I promise, among the many things I’m never going to be good at is Legilimency.”  
  
Draco squeezed his hand once and let it go. “You understand,” he whispered. “You understand why this would be so hard for me.”  
  
“Yeah,” said Harry, and though he left the warmth and weight of his hand behind, it did slip off Draco’s arm. “And I won’t ask you to compromise your standards any more than you already have.” His gaze was so steady, so full of light, that Draco had to move and put the desk between them. “Thank you for listening. For not retreating.”  
  
Draco nodded. “I only said that it would make it harder for me if you went on talking about it. Not that I want to give you up, or that I’m not—open to the idea once you’re no longer a student.”  
  
Here again, Harry showed his difference from ordinary students, because he didn’t argue that he was an adult, and he didn’t press. He nodded, smiled once at Draco from beneath his eyelids, and left.  
  
Draco leaned back against the wall with his mind in a whirl and shut his eyes.  
  
 _Different from ordinary students? You know it goes further than that, Draco, or this wouldn’t be such a problem. You’ve had favorites before, and people who are more skilled than others and who you admired for the quickness of their minds._  
  
 _Say, rather, different from anyone else in the world._  
  
*  
  
“Potter.”  
  
Harry turned around. He knew his expression probably wasn’t neutral, but, well, fuck that anyway. All he wanted was to make sure that what he did wasn’t going to come back to haunt Draco, who might receive insults from some of the other professors that Harry was unaware of. “Yes?”  
  
The student standing behind him was one of the Slytherins who had utterly ignored him when he sat at their table, but at least hadn’t whispered and glanced at him. She had a pale face and straight hair that looked as if it wouldn’t dare do anything but stay where she put it. She also had a book under her arm and a finger that she pointed at him.  
  
“It wasn’t personal, Potter,” she said. “We really do believe that you came back from the dead, and you probably want to make the world a better place, because Gryffindors always do.”  
  
Harry just looked at her without much interest. Someone who thought he was still an uncomplicated Gryffindor wouldn’t say anything he wanted to hear.  
  
“But we knew that you’re the light of Professor Malfoy’s eyes, and some of us were worried that you would make trouble for him.” The woman leaned forwards. “He’s done a lot for us. We don’t want him in trouble.”  
  
Harry blinked. “What’s your name?”  
  
“Morgan Holmes.” The girl looked as if she was giving him a gift, saying that. Well, it was a gift that Harry would use, then, although not for very long.  
  
“I’m not going to get him in trouble, Holmes,” said Harry. She would probably want to be addressed by last name, just the way she’d addressed him. And she watched him without flinching, so it seemed okay. “Maybe stupid people from outside the school would try to say that he brought me back to life from some personal rivalry, or something like that. But I’m not going to listen to gossip. I won’t sit with your table again because I was unwelcome. But I also won’t ask for special favors from him, or try to take all his time. So you can stop worrying about that.”  
  
That got him another unwavering, considering stare, before Holmes finally nodded slowly enough that some glaciers probably moved faster. “And a deeper kind of trouble?”  
  
Harry knew what she meant. The same deeper kind of trouble Draco had asked Harry not to give him, not to  _tempt_ him into.   
  
Harry shook his head. “Not that kind, either.”  
  
Holmes watched him meditatively for a bit, then said, “If anyone could do it, you would be the one.”  
  
Harry surprised himself by snorting. “It’s beneath my dignity, and a long way beneath his.”  
  
Holmes abruptly straightened her back and said, “I’ll tell the others not to bother you. Some of them were planning to sabotage you in Potions if they were assigned as your partner.” Harry didn’t bother correcting her by saying that was the stupidest thing they could do if they wanted to stay on Draco’s good side, because, from her tone, Holmes knew it herself. “But you don’t deserve that.”  
  
“What changed your mind?” Harry asked. Holmes wouldn’t have participated in it, he knew, but she wouldn’t have stopped it either.  
  
“Because you get it,” said Holmes. “I understand. And I know it from the way you said that, and the way you understand dignity and why it’s important.”  
  
She walked away without looking back. Harry stood there blinking for a second, then shrugged and went on his way to Defense. In conclusion, Slytherins were weird, and that hadn’t changed in six years.  
  
 _But that doesn’t make one of them any less worth it._


End file.
